A big U.S. study found that about half of adults who likely still had long COVID a year after getting sick saw their symptoms get better and stay better within three years. About one in four had their symptoms go away completely. But people whose long COVID hit many parts of the body at once were far less likely to get better.
Long COVID is when someone had COVID-19 and still has symptoms months or years later. The U.S. research program that ran this study says millions of people are living with it. It can cause tiredness, trouble thinking clearly, and feeling worse after even a little activity, Bloomberg reports. There is no approved treatment for it.
Who was in the study
Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and other places followed 1,019 adults who still had likely long COVID 12 months after they first got COVID-19. They were part of RECOVER, a long COVID research program paid for by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The team kept track of symptoms like tiredness, brain fog, dizziness, a racing heart, shortness of breath, and changes in smell or taste, Bloomberg reports. A person counted as "improved" when their symptom score stayed below the long COVID line at two study visits in a row.
2 years after getting COVID: 36.2% had lasting improvement.
3 years after getting COVID: 50.1% had lasting improvement.
3 years: 56.4% had much fewer symptoms and a good quality of life.
3 years: about 26.9% had no symptoms left at all.
The researchers say getting better is often slow. They also say the large number of adults living with long COVID shows the need for careful treatment trials, the kind where some people get a fake pill so the results can be trusted.
The big difference: what kind of long COVID you have
Not everyone did as well. About 60% of people whose main problem was a change in smell or taste had improved by three years, Bloomberg reports. For people with symptoms in many body systems at once, it was less than 19%. That is fewer than one in five.
Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the VA St. Louis Health Care System, who was not part of the study, told Bloomberg that the scoring system gives a lot of weight to loss of smell or taste and to a long-lasting cough. He said the many-body-systems group "is a different disease altogether" and that "these patients do not appear to show a robust trajectory of recovery."
What is not known yet
What counts as "recovered." The symptom score used in the study was built with data from the same research program and has not been checked by outside groups in other kinds of patients, Nisreen Alwan, a public health professor at the University of Southampton, told Bloomberg.
Whether it lasts. Long COVID symptoms can get better and then come back, so a good stretch is not always the end of it, Bloomberg reports.
Why some people get better and others don't. This study tracked who improved. It did not test any treatment.
Easy things you can do
If you have long COVID, this study is one reason for hope. Half of the people in it saw lasting improvement within three years, the study's publisher says. It was often slow.
When you read "recovery" numbers, check what was measured. In this study, the outcome depended a lot on which symptoms a person had.
Look at real research, not sales pitches. The NIH's RECOVER program lists its clinical trials and studies of drugs, devices and other approaches that may help long COVID symptoms, and how to get involved.
Talk with your own doctor about your symptoms. This article reports what one study found and is not medical advice.
How this was made: researched and written with the help of AI, then fact-checked three times before publishing: by the writer, by a second, independent AI check, and by automatic rule checks. A person reviews it after it goes up. Every fact links to its source. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
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