The federal government recently allocated $10 million for long COVID research, and some of that money is arriving in Connecticut, including at Yale and UConn.
“The federal government is committing, for the first time, specific amounts of money to do the research and provide the treatment that will be coming to Connecticut and other states around the country,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Tuesday at Hartford Hospital.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 23 million people are out of work because of long COVID, manifested by symptoms that last three or more months after contracting coronavirus. Symptoms include chronic headache, fatigue, trouble breathing, blood clots, rapid heart rate and brain fog.
According to the CDC, 1 in 13 adults in the U.S. have long COVID symptoms.
“We can extrapolate from this disease how we can look at other respiratory viruses,” said Dr. Ulysses Wu, an infectious disease specialist at Hartford Hospital. “And so that’s why the importance of the research is there. Our experiences and our knowledge for all these is ever evolving at this point.”
