Year in Review Health & Medicine

2022 was the year long COVID couldn’t be ignored

Doctors are still looking for ways to treat the lingering symptoms 

an illustration showing a woman falling. She is chained to a huge spikey red COVID-19 virus. Other viruses around her are also chained to falling people.

Millions of people are feeling the weight of long COVID.

KATTY HUERTAS

By Laura Sanders

This year, the world had to face the growing burden of long COVID. A tidal wave of people with lingering symptoms — some mild, some profoundly disabling — commanded attention.

“We are in the middle of a mass disabling event,” physician Talya Fleming of the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., told Science News (SN: 11/5/22, p. 22). A recent estimate suggests that over 18 million people in the United States have long COVID.