What Is Long COVID?

At the start of the pandemic, early reports came out of people who had become infected and did not recover within weeks as we would expect but kept having problems going on for months after their illness. We struggled to make sense out of all these different reports because they largely concentrated on counts of symptoms rather than really saying how severe is this and how does this affect people's health overall. Rather than doing this sort of just reporting counts of symptoms we said okay well what are the big ones and we concentrated on three large clusters of symptoms. One is people who have ongoing fatigue often with bodily pains all over the body and mood swings. Second were people with ongoing breathing problems and then a third cluster of