Long Covid risk has dropped over time but remains substantial, study shows

With a summer wave of Covid-19 infections sweeping the country, a timely new study has looked at the risk of getting long Covid and whether those odds have changed over time.

With a summer wave of Covid-19 infections sweeping the country, a timely new study has looked at the risk of getting long Covid and whether those odds have changed over time. It found that the likelihood of developing long Covid has dropped since the start of the pandemic but remains substantial, especially for people who aren’t vaccinated against the coronavirus. About 7% of American adults, roughly 18 million people, have ever had long Covid, according to an analysis by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that was published in June. Harvard economist David Cutler estimated in 2022 that the total cost of long Covid to the nation was $3.7 trillion, or 17% of the country’s pre-Covid gross domestic product. The new study, which was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that the human and financial toll will only grow. The investigation leaned on computers and advanced machine learning to sift through the data in millions of medical records maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the VA Health System set out to find people who caught Covid over different points in the pandemic – before vaccines were available, during the period when the Delta variant was dominating transmission and after the Omicron family of variants entered the picture – to see whether the risk of lingering symptoms related to long Covid had changed. They also considered vaccination status. People were considered vaccinated if they’d had at least their initial series of shots and unvaccinated if they had not.