(Healthline) — COVID-19 can cause severe illness, sometimes leading to hospitalization and death. But even for people who had mild symptoms, some people have been left with long-term symptoms, now called long-haul COVID-19, or “long COVID.”
“Long COVID is the syndrome of persistent symptoms that develops after the virus that causes COVID has been cleared,” Thomas Gut, DO, associate chair of medicine and director of the Post-COVID Recovery Center at Staten Island University Hospital in New York, told Healthline.
Gut said symptoms can last weeks to months and include brain fog, fatigue, persistent loss of smell or taste, hair loss, and numbness.
With the rise of vaccinations, health experts have been trying to determine whether people who get breakthrough infections would be at the same risk of developing long-haul COVID-19 as unvaccinated people. (…)