Listen: Why long Covid might predate the pandemic

Since the early days of the pandemic, long Covid has haunted us: Even a mild acute infection might leave you with life-altering consequences. And for many, that has, sadly, turned out to be the case. While research suggests long Covid rates are falling, it still affects millions. In June 2023, 6% of Americans reported experiencing long Covid.

But what if long Covid isn’t the right way to think about what they are going through?

On this episode of the First Opinion Podcast, I spoke with Steven Phillips and Michelle A. Williams, authors of a recent First Opinion essay titled, “Long Covid is a new name for an old syndrome.” Steven is a Global Virus Network board member and vice president for science and strategy at the COVID Collaborative; Michelle is the former dean and current Joan and Julius Jacobson professor of epidemiology and public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Michelle and I have come up with basically a new paradigm that says long Covid is really an old disease, and the more you do deep dives into the history of chronic fatigue syndrome and post-infectious fatigue syndromes, the more you realize that not only are there similarities, but the level of congruence between the two is strikingly high,” Steven said.

The purpose of this new paradigm is to “break the logjam” of the current long Covid discourse and “to try to provide a framework whereby people would think about long Covid in a different way in a way that would be more productive,” Michelle told me.

We discussed the history of post-infectious disease syndrome, what rethinking long Covid might mean for research, and the ways the health care system fails chronically ill patients.

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