New EU Commission program to study long COVID

Brussels – Four years after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the EU executive will initiate a program to study the so-called long COVID syndrome, that is, the prolonged persistence of some of the symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection in patients weeks or even months after recovery. 

On Tuesday (Sept. 10), Health and Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides will officially launch a project with a budget of about two million euros, funded by the Eu4Health program and managed by Brussels in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO)and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Among the planned actions will be creating a panel of experts tasked with collecting the testimonies and experiences of patients with the syndrome.

The main areas of intervention will be seven: the most precise possible definition of long COVID syndrome, the development of a monitoring and surveillance system, the promotion of information exchange among health professionals, the dissemination of clinical guidelines and recommendations to relevant authorities in member states, the support for patients and their caregivers, the assessment of the socio-economic consequences of long COVID, and, finally, the identification of gaps in scientific research.​

Although it has now been four years since the most acute phase of the pandemic, studies on the long COVID clinical syndrome are still ongoing to define its characteristics and causes more precisely. Only a portion of those who have contracted COVID-19 develop these symptoms, but the mechanisms that determine and regulate its onset have not yet been fully elucidated. Among the factors that appear to be involved are direct damage to the body caused by the infection or disease and an abnormal response of the immune system (which develops a kind of “autoimmunity”). It appears that risk factors then include older age, female sex, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

Although, as a rule, there is some correlation between the severity of the disease and the risk of onset of long COVID, cases of the latter have been reported even after relatively mild forms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially with regard to the Omicron variant—in fact, the percentage of patients infected with Omicron who develop Long COVID syndrome is lower than that of those infected with the Delta variant, but as the former has become more widespread the absolute number of patients with Long COVID from Omicron tends to be higher. In any case, evidence seems to indicate that a full vaccination cycle (with three doses) relatively effectively protects against long COVID.

According to WHO data, about 36 million people in Europe were affected by long COVID between 2020 and 2023, while the European Commission estimates the cost of the syndrome on the economy of the Twenty-Seven to be between 0.2 and 0.3 per cent of GDP for 2022.