One of Australia's leading doctors wants everyone to stop using the term "long COVID" after a new study found the long-term effects of the coronavirus are no different to those of other viruses like the flu.
The study by Queensland Health looked at more than 5000 Queenslanders who had respiratory illness symptoms from late May to late June 2022, when the Omicron variant had spread across the state.
Just under half of those tested positive for COVID-19 on a PCR test, while of the 2713 who tested negative, just under 1000 were confirmed to have influenza.
The study found long COVID is a syndrome "indistinguishable from seasonal influenza and other respiratory illnesses, with no evidence of increased moderate-to-severe functional limitations a year after infection", the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) said.
The findings will be presented at next month's congress in Spain.
"The analysis found no evidence that COVID-19-positive adults were more likely to have moderate-to-severe functional limitations a year after their diagnosis than symptomatic adults who were negative for COVID-19 (3.0 per cent vs 4.1 per cent)," the ECCMID said.
"Moreover, results were similar when compared with the 995 symptomatic adults who had influenza (3.0 per cent vs 3.4 per cent)."
Queensland Chief Health Officer John Gerrard said the amount of attention on long COVID symptoms was simply down to the high level of the virus throughout the community.
"In health systems with highly vaccinated populations, long COVID may have appeared to be a distinct and severe illness because of high volumes of COVID-19 cases during the pandemic," he said.
"However, we found that the rates of ongoing symptoms and functional impairment are indistinguishable from other post-viral illnesses.
"These findings underscore the importance of comparing post-COVID-19 outcomes with those following other respiratory infections, and of further research into post-viral syndromes."
He said the findings meant it was time to stop saying "long COVID".
"We believe it is time to stop using terms like 'long COVID'," he said.
"They wrongly imply there is something unique and exceptional about longer-term symptoms associated with this virus.
"This terminology can cause unnecessary fear, and in some cases, hypervigilance to longer symptoms that can impede recovery."
While many other experts in the field have welcomed the study, not all are convinced it's time to abandon the term.
"There are likely reasons why persistent symptoms following COVID in this Queensland cohort may be no more frequent than following other viruses including the predominantly vaccinated cohort and the high frequency of Omicron variants," paediatric infectious diseases physician Professor Philip Britton said.
"These factors are acknowledged by the authors.
"It is because of these specific factors as well as inherent limitations of the study methodology itself, that their conclusion that it is 'time to stop using terms like "long COVID"' is overstated and potentially unhelpful.
"Long COVID has been a global phenomenon, recognised by the World Health Organisation."
The latest COVID-19 strain spreading across the world
Professor Jeremy Nicholson, the director of the Australian National Phenome Center at Murdoch University, agrees.
"The absence of evidence is different from evidence of absence," he said.
"So the authors' assertion that long COVID is the same as flu-related post-viral syndrome is not proven, even if long COVID is indeed a post-viral syndrome (which it is).
"What is certainly true is that the pandemic nature of COVID-19 created a huge number (millions of people worldwide) of long COVID sufferers and that this has drawn attention to the problem and given it a name.
"But we still do not know whether long COVID is physiologically or mechanistically different to other post-viral syndromes, we lack the evidence because it has not been studied properly to date...
"Until this is resolved, we should still use the long COVID term because it pinpoints exactly the underlying viral cause."
