As the Biden administration ends the COVID-19 public health emergency, millions of Americans who contracted the disease continue to suffer from symptoms associated with long COVID.
Neuropsychologist James C. Jackson says people with long COVID can suffer from symptoms like exhaustion, shortness of breath and disturbed sleep. Some of the most troubling symptoms are neurological: struggling to remember things, to focus, even to perform basic daily tasks and solve problems.
These symptoms can lead to a loss of employment, income and important relationships. Jackson, who is a research professor at Vanderbilt University, says that while long COVID was initially associated with people who became critically ill with COVID-19, he’s seeing an increasing number of patients for whom the initial illness was relatively mild.
He notes while the scientific community rallied in response to COVID-19, there’s been less urgency in the response to long COVID, leaving patients and families on their own to find solutions.
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“We were very successful at mobilizing our best scientists, our best experts to develop a vaccine in record time,” Jackson says. “That same commitment to doing something game-changing has too often been absent in the context of long COVID.”
