CDC data shows nearly 18m people could be living with long Covid even as health agency relaxes isolation recommendations
Some 6.8% of American adults are currently experiencing long Covid symptoms, according to a new survey from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), revealing an “alarming” increase in recent months even as the health agency relaxes Covid isolation recommendations, experts say.
That means an estimated 17.6 million Americans could now be living with long Covid.
“This should be setting off alarms for many people,” said David Putrino, the Nash Family Director of the Cohen Center for Recovery From Complex Chronic Illness at Mount Sinai. “We’re really starting to see issues emerging faster than I expected.”
When the same survey was conducted in October, 5.3% of respondents were experiencing long Covid symptoms at the time.
The 1.5 percentage-point increase comes after the second-biggest surge of infections across the US this winter, as measured by available wastewater data.
This has been one of my big concerns since we first learned of long Covid. There’s still so much we don’t know about this virus and its effects. Folks try to play down the threat -first it was “just the flu”, then it was “it’s over and done with” - but we just don’t know what that means, even if “regular” Covid or “bad” Covid is “gone”. There are still other variants out there, people are still getting infected though maybe not as badly as they were, but regardless, what does that mean for those with long Covid years from now?
Yup, my grandpa’s brother had Scarlet fever as a kid, and in his later years the heart damage prevented from from continuing activities he wanted to do at a much younger age than his peers.