How to Reduce Your Risk of Long-COVID Realistically, According to Research
#5. Consider metformin if you caught Covid-19
As a researcher who has written a few important topics on long-Covid in Medium, as well as published a few scientific papers about it, I’ve come to understand long-Covid quite well, including realistic and actionable ways to reduce its risk.
First, let’s clarify what long-Covid is. It’s an umbrella term for whatever symptoms — though fatigue and brain fog are the common ones — that occur after Covid-19. Such symptoms should be unexplainable by alternative diagnoses and last for a few weeks (according to Amercian criteria) or months (according to British and WHO’s criteria).
The prevalence of long-Covid is tricky to pinpoint. Meta-analyses tend to report a 30–80% prevalence of long-Covid among Covid-19 survivors. But before the pandemic, about 20–40% of the general population have long-Covid symptoms like fatigue. If you control for this background rate, the true prevalence of long-Covid is likely <20%.
If you count only those whose long-Covid symptoms impair their daily activities, the prevalence is likely <5%. Still, even if the chance of long-Covid severely harming your life is low, it’s a chronic condition. Only 50–70% of long-Covid patients recover within 3–9…
