SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – It’s been five years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic and, while lockdown measures and masking are mostly memories, there is at least one lingering sign of days when the virus raged: Long COVID.
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This complication of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 has disproportionately impacted women, and researchers are still examining why. Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of global health and infectious diseases at the Stanford University School of Medicine, joined KCBS Radio this week to discuss the latest findings.
“Well, it’s just one of a series of new findings that these long-term studies are finally starting to demonstrate that we don’t understand enough about not only the viral infection but our own body's response to this virus and maybe other viruses as well,” she said. “What it shows us is that this is another in a list of diseases that appear to represent themselves very differently by… sex, and we don’t really have a great clue why.”
There are some hints, however. Maldonado said that these mainly point to some hormonal or genetic differences between men and women, the way we respond to infections, and how our immune responses respond to other environmental stimuli.
One factor touched on in the KCBS Radio interview was that women tend to follow up on their systems with a doctor visit more often than men do. However, she said that doesn’t always mean that women have more reported symptoms for diseases. For example, heart disease symptoms tend to be underrepresented in women, Maldonado said.
Overall, an estimated 8% of U.S. adults have had Long COVID, according to a study published last December in the JAMA Network Open journal. At that time, under 4% reported that they currently were suffering from the condition. Per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Long COVID is more likely to develop in Hispanic and Latino people as well as women and people with health vulnerabilities.
Long COVID “is a serious illness that can result in chronic conditions requiring comprehensive care and may cause disability,” according to the CDC. Anyone who had had COVID can experience this complication.
Maldonado said that rates of Long COVID have “really dropped off dramatically,” since the peak of the pandemic.
“Nobody really understands why because the Long COVID is just a collection of a lot of different types of symptoms,” she told KCBS Radio. “And some thoughts are that when people were fully susceptible – that is, no immunity at all – and got COVID, that that’s when a lot of these symptoms of Long COVID were more likely to appear. But we’re certainly not seeing any of the same rates of Long COVID now than we saw at the beginning of the pandemic.”
People who developed Long COVID during the peak of the pandemic really did develop lasting symptoms, Maldonado added.
“I still see patients now who are still complaining of the pain symptoms that they had years ago when they first got sick,” she said. “So, it is by no means over, but fortunately it is less common. But, there are also people who are still suffering the chronic long COVID symptoms. And so, for some small group of people, the symptoms have not cleared up.”
Though rates of new Long COVID cases are down, Maldonado said that one key method of prevention is vaccination. Otherwise, hygiene measures for COVID prevention also decrease the risk of developing Long COVID.
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