Last year, Emily Pfaff, Ph.D., M.S., was part of a team investigating who in the US had been diagnosed with Long COVID, which is when symptoms from a COVID-19 infection linger long after the initial illness is over. In part, they found that people living in wealthier ZIP codes were more likely to be diagnosed with lingering symptoms than people living in lower-income areas. But that data point alone may not tell a complete story.
"We don't actually think people who are in wealthier areas are more likely to have Long COVID," says Dr. Pfaff, an informatics researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and Co-Director of the Informatics and Data Science (IDSci) team at the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS).
Instead, Dr. Pfaff suggests that this finding might be a result of health care access. People living in both high-income and low-income areas probably suffering from Long COVID at similar rates—but people in high-income areas may be diagnosed with Long COVID more often, possibly because wealthier areas have more specialists who are regularly diagnosing patients with this new and complicated condition…
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