Wiktionary

long COVID

See also: long covid and long Covid

English

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WOTD – 10 March 2023

Etymology

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A long-COVID outpatient clinic in Vienna, Austria.

Blend of long-term +‎ COVID, coined by Elisa Perego, an archaeologist working in London and sufferer of the condition who used the term in tweets on the online social networking service Twitter as a hashtag and in running text in May 2020 (see the quotations), leading to its widespread use.[1]

Pronunciation

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Noun

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long COVID (uncountable)

  1. (pathology) Long-term sequelae or symptoms (such as brain fog, extreme fatigue, or shortness of breath) following a COVID-19 infection, which persist after the SARS-CoV-2 virus is no longer active. [from 2020]
    Synonyms: chronic Covid, chronic COVID syndrome, long-haul COVID, long-tail Covid, long-term Covid, ongoing covid, post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, post Covid, post-COVID-19 condition, post-COVID-19 syndrome, post-COVID syndrome
    • 2020 May 15, Elisa Perego (@elisaperego78), Twitter‎[2], archived from the original on 2020-05-15:
      In Italy this is not much discussed for now. But the long covid is here, too, of course. I think drs [doctors] will slowly come to understand it, as they see patients fail to recover properly.
    • [2020 May 21, Elisa Perego (@elisaperego78), Twitter‎[3], archived from the original on 2022-07-27:
      The #LongCovid #COVID19 is starting to be addressed on major newspapers in Italy 🇮🇹 too: […]]
    • 2020 September 8, Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, “Oral Evidence: Social Care: Funding and Workforce, HC 206”, in UK Parliament: Committees (Health and Social Care Select Committee, House of Commons of the United Kingdom)‎[4], London: Parliament of the United Kingdom, archived from the original on 2022-10-27, question 185:
      There is also absolutely no doubt of the severity of the consequences of long Covid.
    • 2021 January, Felicity Callard, Elisa Perego, “How and Why Patients Made Long Covid”, in Ichiro Kawachi, S. V. Subramanian, editors, Social Science & Medicine, volume 268, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, →PMID, article number 113426, page 2, column 1:
      There are strong reasons to argue that Long Covid is the first illness to be made through patients finding one another on Twitter and other social media. Both of us have Long Covid and have contributed to making it.
    • 2021 September 1, “English Study Finds Long COVID Affects up to 1 in 7 Children Months after Infection”, in Reuters‎[5], archived from the original on 2022-08-18:
      As many as 1 in 7 children may have symptoms linked to the coronavirus months after testing positive for COVID-19, the authors of an English study on long COVID in adolescents said on Wednesday. Children rarely become severely ill with COVID-19 but they can suffer lingering symptoms, and the study is one of the largest of its kind on how common so-called long COVID is in the age group.
    • 2022, Nicola Cornick, “Lucy”, in The Winter Garden, London: HQ, HarperCollins, →ISBN:
      Her consultant had been matter of fact: 'Post-viral fatigue,' he had said briskly. 'We see a lot of it after the flu, or viral pneumonia like yours …' he'd shrugged, 'it's similar to long COVID, that tail of symptoms that carry on after the initial infection has gone. I'll prescribe you some steroid treatment, but you need to rest.'
    • 2022 June 17, “Omicron Less Likely to Cause Long COVID: UK Study”, in CNA‎[6], Singapore, archived from the original on 2022-06-17:
      The Omicron variant of coronavirus is less likely to cause long COVID than previous variants, according to the first peer-reviewed study of its kind from the United Kingdom. Researchers at King's College London, using data from the ZOE COVID Symptom Study app, found that the odds of developing long COVID after infection were 20 per cent to 50 per cent lower during the Omicron wave in the United Kingdom compared to Delta.
    • 2023, Don Goldenberg, Marc Dichter, “The Way Forward: For Patients, Healthcare Providers, and Research”, in Unravelling Long COVID, Hoboken, N.J., Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, →ISBN, page 192:
      We believe that, whenever possible, long-COVID therapy should be initiated in a specialty center and evaluated as part of a collaborative, controlled, clinical trial. Every healthcare provider must familiarize themselves with long COVID. If just 5% of patients have symptoms for more than two months following COVID-19, then about 7 million people in the United States are currently suffering from long COVID.
  2. (economics, informal, by extension) Long-term negative economic effects persisting after the COVID pandemic.
    • 2021, Chenyan Lyu, Tooraj Jamasb, Jan Peter Georg Spanholtz, The Long Covid of Energy Markets and Prices
      [See title.]

Alternative forms

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Translations

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ Elisa Perego [et al.] (2020 October 1) “Why We Need to Keep Using the Patient Made Term ‘Long Covid’”, in The BMJ Opinion‎[1], archived from the original on 2023-01-11: “Long Covid was first used by Elisa Perego as a Twitter hashtag in May to describe her own experience of a multiphasic, cyclical condition that differed in time course and symptomatology from the bi-phasic pathway discussed in early scientific papers, which focused on hospitalized patients.”

Further reading

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