Working-age adults living with long COVID feel less satisfied with life, experience less happiness, and have less hope, according to a study published this week in BMC Public Health. The paper highlights the association between having long COVID and poorer wellbeing.
“The findings underscore that the burden of long COVID extends beyond clinical health outcomes to encompass how individuals evaluate and experience their lives,” wrote the authors, from Syracuse University in New York.
“Long COVID symptoms were significantly associated with lower levels of subjective wellbeing in a dose-dependent manner.”
The World Health Organization defines long COVID “as the continuation or development of new symptoms 3 months after the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection, with these symptoms lasting for at least 2 months with no other explanation.”
Understanding wellbeing in people with long COVID
Past research indicates that people with long COVID report more anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder than people without it. The authors of this paper hoped to understand how living with long COVID affected people’s overall appreciation of life.
They examined data from the 2023 and 2024 National Wellbeing Survey, which gathers information about Americans’ health and wellbeing. Surveys from those two years included questions about long COVID, and the scientists included only people who completely answered questions about COVID-19 and long COVID.
For this paper, people had long COVID if they experienced any of eight symptoms: fatigue; cognitive difficulties, such as concentration troubles; problems breathing, such as shortness of breath; muscle or joint pain; rapid heartbeat or chest pain; dizziness when standing; depression, anxiety, or mood alterations; or symptoms that worsen following physical activity.
Of the 13,880 participants ages 18 to 64, 39% experienced long COVID, with women more likely to report symptoms of it than men, 43.2% and 34.4%, respectively.
Long COVID symptoms were significantly associated with lower levels of subjective wellbeing in a dose-dependent manner.
Having even one sign of long COVID was associated with a 0.063-point decrease on the life satisfaction scale, which measures satisfaction on a scale of zero to 1. Participants with symptoms also scored lower on happiness and hopefulness.
“Our findings extend prior research linking long COVID to adverse mental health outcomes such as clinical depression and anxiety by demonstrating that long COVID is also associated with diminished subjective wellbeing—a construct that captures how individuals evaluate and experience their lives beyond the presence or absence of diagnosable mental health conditions,” the authors said.
The more symptoms people had, the less satisfied they felt, suggesting that a greater long-COVID disease burden worsened wellbeing.
“The finding that one or two symptoms were generally insufficient to reduce wellbeing, while higher symptom counts were associated with progressively larger hits to wellbeing, suggests a threshold or cumulative burden dynamic,” the authors explained.
