Long COVID: Four Years and Counting

This new book, Long COVID: 4 Years and Counting, is written for long COVID patients, their families, and their caregivers. It focuses on patients who developed multiple, persistent symptoms after a mild or moderate initial COVID-19 infection and whose symptoms continue to interfere with their lives. Written by an expert physician in fibromyalgia, this new book explains the shared clinical and mechanistic features of long COVID with fibromyalgia, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and other “contested, invisible” illnesses. This book reviews the important role that patient advocacy has played in long COVID and how that has helped offset the stigma that many long COVID patients have experienced. Controversial long COVID topics, including exercise, activity and disability, and psychosocial factors, are discussed. The development of long COVID clinics, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, is reviewed as well as current recommendations for optimal multidisciplinary and patient-centric care, including enhanced primary and specialty care integration. In the near future, innovative research will further explore the pathways in which the central nervous system and autonomic nervous system drive such diverse symptoms as exhaustion, pain, brain fog, headaches, sleep and mood disturbance. This will result in a better understanding and treatment for long COVID, and its overlapping illnesses.