Our understanding of "long COVID"

For this preliminary entry to the long COVID discourse, researchers in the JAMA study isolated 875 subjects from the health monitor-wearing database (all of whom wear Fitbits), and compared those who had tested positive with COVID to those who had reported “a fever, cough, body aches or other symptoms of a respiratory illness” due to another infection. While everyone slept more and walked less after they got sick, individuals with COVID clearly had a more drastic change. It took an average of 79 days for their resting heart rates to return to normal, compared to just four days for those who didn’t have COVID... More here.

This will be interesting to fully understand as we start to learn more. The image above is my VO2 from Apple Health and it shows what happened when I caught Covid at the start of January.

I definitely do not have long Covid, but 6 months later I am still well below where I was and I suspect the majority who caught it have this problem.