With COVID cases surging again, it’s time for a new public health policy that emphasizes prevention and ‘long COVID’ treatments

With each new story about a world leader, Olympic athlete, Tour de France cyclist or famous musician impacted by COVID-19, we are left wondering: “What, exactly, is our plan moving forward?” 

After all, it has become very clear for anyone paying even a tiny bit of attention that, when it comes to COVID, our country’s current “nothing to see here … it’s just a cold … symptoms are mild … thankful for my vaccines” public health strategy simply isn’t working. 

In fact, though vaccines have greatly improved people’s symptoms during the acute phase of COVID, there are still several horrific — and even life-threatening — long-term consequences of this disease that may be hiding under the surface and not appearing for weeks, months or even years. 

As the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has explained: “People with Long COVID can have a wide variety of symptoms that can range from mild to severe and may be similar to symptoms from other illnesses. Symptoms can last weeks, months, or years after COVID-19 illness and can emerge, persist, resolve, and reemerge over different lengths of time.”

These long-term complications can be neurological, respiratory and cardiovascular in nature, causing everything from frontal lobe damage in our brains — which can lead to damaged executive functioning, loss of our sense of smell, depression, rage, memory problems and even marked personality changes. 

In September, researchers from the NYU Grossman School of Medicine found a direct link between being infected with COVID and later having a stroke or heart attack. 

“Our findings provide, for the first time, a direct mechanistic link between COVID-19 infection and the heart complications it provokes,” the study’s lead author stated in a UNMC news release announcing the research. “The virus creates a highly inflammatory environment that could make it easier for plaque to grow, rupture, and block blood flow to the heart, brain and other key organs.”

We will soon enter our fifth year of this COVID era, and the majority of people — including many health professionals who used to think nothing of masking in oncology and neonatal intensive care units to protect their patients — are now under a false belief that COVID does minimal damage to our bodies and that keeping up on our vaccines, which we now know only truly protect us for around three months, will somehow make this ever-evolving, ever-mutating virus disappear. 

We see a sort of turning away from the research and the latest COVID news, as if ignoring the issue will help us become immune from the sometimes severe, long-term consequences of this relatively new virus. 

Unfortunately, for those who do keep up on the research, we now know that public health mandates such as wearing a quality mask like an N-95 respirator, which uses electrostatic fibers to prevent a virus like SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, to enter our noses or mouths, and implementing a widespread vaccine campaign could have saved nearly 250,000 lives in the United States over the past four years. 

“COVID-19 restrictions saved lives,” the researchers wrote. “The death toll was probably considerably higher than it would otherwise have been in states that resisted imposing these restrictions, banned their use, or implemented them for only relatively short periods of time.”

When President Joe Biden was running against former President Donald Trump in 2020, he promised stricter COVID-prevention measures and soon rolled out his “test to treat” campaign, which was supposed to give antivirals like Paxlovid to people who tested positive for COVID via local pharmacies. Within a few months of taking office, however, Biden seemed to give up entirely on this pro-public health plan. When the masking mandates in healthcare centers, schools and public transportation ended, we were told that the mandates would reappear if/when a COVID surge was happening. 

That promise, too, seems to have disappeared entirely. We are currently in the middle of a huge summertime COVID wave. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that COVID has reached a nearly two-year high in California, where “almost everybody has it.” 

We have known since at least 2022, that even fully vaccinated people who catch COVID – including those who are asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms — can not only pass it to others but also can suffer the same debilitating “long COVID” symptoms as unvaccinated folks or those who have a severe acute case of COVID. 

As we watch some of the healthiest people on the planet (the Olympic athletes competing in Paris right now) catch COVID and spread it to their teammates, coaches and visitors alike, we should all be thinking about where our public health strategy went wrong — allowing nearly 1.2 million Americans to die from COVID since January 2020, including about 1,000 just over the past month — and consider how we can collectively do better over the next five years. 

Do we want to continue to ignore COVID at our own risk – and especially at the risk of those who are more susceptible to the impacts of acute and long COVID — or do we want to demand that our next set of national leaders help our nation invest in air purification systems, updated vaccines that can help us fight the latest variants and mask mandates during COVID surges (knowing, of course, that one of the 2024 presidential candidates, Trump, already completely screwed up our country’s initial public health response, leading to about 40% more deaths, by downplaying the virus, allowing conservative state leaders to ignore public health mandates and disregarding some of the best methods for fighting COVID, including respirator masks and air purifiers)?