This week, the World Health Organization has published diagnostic criteria for Long Covid, a perplexed condition that has affected COVID-19 survivors. Among other things, WHO notes that patients may experience monthly symptoms after their initial infection and that these symptoms can be serious enough to have an impact on their daily operation.
Long Covid is the label adopted and popular with its early victims in the pandemic. Much of the early research on its characteristics has been conducted or strongly involved these patient communities. But there are many questions on Long Covid, including the frequency to which it occurs and the underlying mechanisms behind the many symptoms associated with it.
A need to study any medical problem is to have a clear description, which can be widely adopted by doctors, patients and other parties involved. Wednesday, WHO has published a definition of clinical cases for Long Covid, which formally refer to “Post Covid-19 State”.
The short and soft version defines long Covid as one thing that occurs in people with a history of probable or confirmed infection of SARS COV-2, usually three months from the appearance of their original case. The symptoms include but are not limited to fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive dysfunction, often called brain fog. Symptoms can be persistent since acute infection or emerge later, and they can fluctuate in gravity over time, but they should be in progress for at least two months before a formal diagnosis is performed. IMPORTANT, there should be no alternative explanation that could better respond to the disease of a patient.
To find these criteria, WHO led what is called a Delphi consensus, which calls for the collection of the contribution of relevant experts and other stakeholders on a subject. This included WHO staff surveys, external experts, patients and patient researchers. Everything said, they contacted people in 44 countries from six regions of the world covered by WHO.
Also this month, American centers for disease control and prevention have officially added a formal diagnostic code for Long Covid or “Post Covid-19 State”, at the latest edition of the International Classification of Disease, The IMC-10. ICD codes are used by doctors, hospitals and insurance companies for diagnostic and billing purposes, the latter being probably crucial for patients requiring long-term care and rehabilitation. The Biden administration promised that long Covid patients will be considered invalid if their symptoms are serious enough to significantly restrict their lives.
WHO has called for countries, researchers and others around the world to adopt their criteria as a global standard. But they recognize that this can change over time because we learn more about Long Covid.
“COVID-19 will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. Many answers waiting around Covid-19 and its sequelae remain, with new questions being constantly formulated, “the authors of the full report describing the new definition written. “This definition of the Post-19 Covid-19 condition will help advance advocacy and research, but will likely change as new evidence emerge and our understanding of the consequences of COVID-19 continues to evolve.”