The Long Haul

USC study finds long COVID affects 23% of positive cases, causing symptoms that may last months.

Headaches. Fatigue. Diarrhea. If you experienced any of these symptoms weeks after you tested negative for COVID19, you might be a “long hauler.” A new USC study finds that 23% of people infected with COVID develop the sometimes debilitating symptoms that can last for months.

“Long COVID is a major public health concern. Twenty-three percent is a very high prevalence, and it may translate to millions of people,” says first author Qiao Wu, a doctoral candidate at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. “More knowledge on its prevalence, persistent symptoms and risk factors may help health care professionals allocate resources and services to help long haulers get back to normal lives.”

SYMPTOMS LAST 12 WEEKS OR LONGER SARS-CoV-2 is typically an acute illness lasting about three weeks, but the World Health Organizationand USC researchers define long COVID as symptoms that last 12 weeks or longer.

Using the Understanding Coronavirus in America survey conducted for the study by the USC Center for Economic and Social Research at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, USC researchers interviewed 308 infected individuals culled from 8,000 participants.

WHO WILL GET LONG COVID? After accounting for preexisting symptoms, about 23% of the participants reported that they had experienced new-onset symptoms during infection which lasted for more than 12 weeks, meeting the study’s definition of long COVID.

The new-onset, persistent symptoms most commonly experienced by long COVID patients were headache, runny or stuffy nose, abdominal discomfort, fatigue and diarrhea.

In addition, the researchers found that people had significantly higher odds of experiencing long COVID if, at the time of infection, they were obese, experienced hair loss, or had a headache or a sore throat.

There was a lack of evidence relating the risk of long COVID to preexisting health conditions, such as diabetes or asthma, or age, gender, race/ethnicity, education or current smoking status.

Policing by the Numbers

Researchers from USC Dornsife developed a public database that gives insight into fatal encounters with the police.

What causes deadly police incidents?

Researchers from the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) are seeking answers and have developed the publicly accessible National Officer-Involved Homicide Database (NOIHD) to help give fresh insight regarding fatal encounters with police.

“Most research regarding police homicides is based on data aggregated from a state or county,” says Brian Finch, a researcher who led the development of the database. “We built the NOIHD to better understand the factors that may be related to deadly police incidents … at a more micro level.”

His team pulled from the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and other sources to create the database.

Finch, a professor of sociology and spatial sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, says some preliminary findings, which have not yet undergone peer review, were unsurprising. “For example, departments that require officers to have more training and higher levels of education tend to have lower levels of homicide,” he says.

What was surprising to Finch is that officer- involved homicides seem to be increasing faster in suburban and rural areas than in cities. His research also indicates that deadly incidents with the police are less likely to show up in official sources if the medical examiner or coroner is overseen by the sheriff’s department rather than by another county department. JIM KEY