Analysis: Some estimates are that up to 54 per cent of those infected will get long COVID. But the real number is still very much a mystery | liammannix
Problem three: there’s no consensus across studies of how “long” long COVID is. Is it symptoms that last two weeks? A month? A year?
Problem four: many studies ask people to self-report their symptoms rather than objectively measuring them. Some people are less likely to notice and report symptoms than others – think of your grumpy old uncle who refuses to ever go to the doctor. And the final, big problem: the lack of a control group. Without one, we can’t tell whether the persistent symptoms are caused by COVID or something else. “If you survey anyone, some are going to say they feel fatigued,” says Associate Professor Bette Liu, an epidemiologist at the University of NSW.
Martiniuk’s perfect study of long COVID would look like this: randomly select a few thousand people who have never had COVID and follow them over several years. Then compare the people who get long COVID to those who get the virus butThree years and a bunch of new variants into the pandemic, such a study is now impossible. That means our data is necessarily imperfect – making it hard to know if we’ve ever truly hit the bullseye.