Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center.
Long COVID continues to be a moving target -- continuously evolving and still surprising doctors and patients who have sometimes incapacitating long-term symptoms.
Little about the disorder seems predictable at this point. People can have long COVID after asymptomatic, mild, or severe COVID-19, for example. And when a person gets long COVID -- also known as long-haul COVID -- symptoms can vary widely.
To address all the uncertainty, the New York State Department of Health gathered experts in primary care, pediatrics, physical medicine, rehabilitation, and pulmonology to answer some pressing questions.
New York in 2020 was the first epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, making it also the center of the long COVID epidemic, says Emily Lutterloh, MD, director of the Division of Epidemiology at the New York State Department of Health.
What do you do when you're seeing a patient with long COVID for the first time?
The first exam varies because there are so many different ways long COVID presents itself, says Benjamin Abramoff, MD, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia.
Assessing their previous and current care also helps to direct their ongoing management, says Zijian Chen, MD, medical director of the Center for Post-COVID Care at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.
