Report on long COVID sees big numbers

I am 100 percent a di erent person

BY JOHN DALEY COLORADO PUBLIC RADIO

State o cials have released their rst estimate of how many people in Colorado have been hit by long COVID-19. e gure is staggering: Data suggest that between 230,000 and 650,000 Coloradans may have been a ected.

With a state population of nearly 6 million, the data suggest as many as one in 10 Coloradans have experienced long COVID, according to the report from e O ce of Saving People Money on Healthcare in the lieutenant governor’s o ce. And many of them have struggled to nd treatments and answers about what can be a life-altering illness.

People with post-COVID conditions can have a wide range of symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog and headaches, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ose may be prolonged, lasting weeks, months, or even years after infection.

Some patients described their challenges in a January segment on CPR’s Colorado Matters.

“I think that’s what’s so unclear about long COVID and potentially concerning about those numbers is that we certainly know some people recover,” but most haven’t, said Dr. Sarah Jolley, a researcher with CU Anshutz. Jolley is also the medical director of the UCHealth Post-COVID Clinic, one site of a national study looking at recovery after COVID.

Jolley said only 30 to 40 percent of long COVID patients have returned to their individual health baseline so far, based on what she’s observed and seen in research.

“ ere are a number of folks where symptoms persist much longer and so it’s hard to estimate what proportion of that 600,000 will have longerterm symptoms versus shorter-term long COVID symptoms,” she said. “I would say the minority of individuals that we’ve seen have had complete recovery.” e implications of that are enormous, Jolley said, both in terms of so-called long-haulers’ quality of life as well as Colorado’s workforce, education, health care and other systems.

Jolley said the best protection and prevention against long COVID is getting fully vaccinated, including the latest booster. “We know that vaccination lessens the risk of long COVID, lessens the severity of initial disease,” she said, noting the lagging number of people getting the omicron booster in Colorado. Currently, only about a quarter of eligible people in the state have received the omicron booster, according to the state’s vaccine dashboard, far below the uptake for the initial series of vaccines. e report includes testimonials from Coloradans that provide a window into what its authors described as the “immense human costs” of the illness:

Chelsey B., 49

“I went from being a t, active, successful and nancially secure professional in the prime of life to a broken — and broke — person,” Chelsey reported. “COVID kills some people outright; many of us with long COVID are dying, too — just very slowly and painfully.”

Melissa, 54

“Four months after my initial