The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has logged more than 104 million COVID-19 cases in the US as of late April

While the World Health Organization ended the global emergency status for COVID-19 on May 5,5 more than three years after its original declaration, Long COVID continues to be serious health issue around the globe.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has logged more than 104 million COVID-19 cases in the US as of late April. And according to the most recent Household Pulse Survey data, collected by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, more than 11 percent of adults who ever had COVID-19 currently have symptoms that have lasted at least 3 months.

In an article, “How Primary Care Physicians Can Recognize and Treat Long COVID” published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on May 3, authors call for urgent need for research on Long COVID, saying last August, the US Department of Health and Human Services launched a research action plan for the extended infection that includes the National Institutes of Health–funded Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery, or RECOVER Initiative.

The article provides basic guidance for primary care physicians: It says that primary care physicians “should be willing to think outside the box and use their medical training to provide sensible, supportive care.”

People with long COVID “feel we are not listening to them,” said Ana Palacio, MD, MPH, an internal medicine specialist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Yet at the same time, physicians “feel frustrated that they do not have the resources and the information and the time to deal with this.”

Since the 1980s, Palacio noted, the practice of medicine has shifted away from relying on a physician’s experiences and gut feelings toward a more systematic approach where illnesses are diagnosed and treated with standard protocols based on evidence.

Physicians are “trained to tackle a couple of issues per visit and to use evidence-based approaches and to use codes to get their health system reimbursed,” Palacio said in an interview. And to “make things systematic,” she added, “we are trained in cardiology, gastroenterology, pulmonary—the organ systems are separate.”

There are not enough Long COVID specialty clinics to meet patient need, Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, chief of research and education service at the Veterans Affairs (VA) St Louis Health Care System, said in an interview.

“We’re going to have to figure out a way to make sure the larger community of physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and primary care clinicians is educated to recognize and treat [Long COVID].”

This is also why when WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared an end to the COVID as a global health emergency last Friday, he clarified that it did not mean COVID was over as a global health threat.

Also Read: Covid-19 no longer a global health emergency, says WHO