And that, she says, is what most people fail to understand about long COVID: how serious it is, how much is at stake — how fast a healthy girl with boundless energy and big dreams can lose it all. "They think it's incredibly rare, or they don't understand that just because you had one 'nice' bout of COVID doesn't mean the next one isn't going to do permanent damage," Katie says. "People just underestimate it; they assume it won't happen to them and if it does, that someone will be there to help them."

The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from.

She knew about Long COVID, the name for chronic symptoms following an infection, because her 11-year-old son has it. But “he didn’t have anything like this,” she says. “His set of symptoms are totally different,” involving spiking fevers and vocal and motor tics. Her own experience was so different from her son's, it was hard to believe the same condition could be to blame. “I just thought, ‘It’s really coincidental that I never got well, and now I’m getting worse,’” she says.

“I think that we need to understand that infections lead to chronic disease and we need to take infection seriously,” even when it seems to be mild, Al-Aly said.

What we do know, definitively and without question, is that COVID-19 is not “just a cold,” as some right-wingers have maintained. As the Nature Reviews article notes, “SARS-CoV-2 has the capacity to damage many organ systems.”

“It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’ve had one, so it’s OK. Now I can take off my mask, do what I like.’ It has health consequences for reinfections – higher mortality rate, higher hospitalization rates, higher risk of long term, lingering symptoms,” she says.

Opinion: Can having Covid trigger shingles? Yes, probably, according to Associate Professor Helen Petousis-Harris, and you might want to think about a shingles vaccine.

Policymakers, public-health officials, and the media “have often portrayed covid as a short, flu-like disease, especially in the young,” Perego wrote in an email. As a result, people might not make the connection between a case of COVID-19 and health issues months later, especially if they had a mild initial illness or are fully vaccinated; other people may have been asymptomatically infected or got a false-negative test result, so they don’t know they had COVID-19 at all.

Another consistent finding is that it does not appear to matter whether non-hospitalized patients had more severe cases of COVID-19, mild cases or even cases that caused no symptoms at all.