Other factors play a role. Dr. Baratta said he is seeing patients with long COVID who have refused the vaccine or developed long COVID after a second or third infection.
He said he thinks that attitudes toward the pandemic have resulted in relaxed protection and prevention efforts.
“There is low booster vaccination rate and additional masking is utilized less that before,” he said. About 20% of the population has received the latest vaccine booster, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The increase in long COVID has many causes including “infection, reinfection (eg, people getting COVID after a second, third, or fourth infection), low vaccination rates, waning immunity, and decline in the use of antivirals (such as Paxlovid),” said Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, chief of research at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care and clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri.
“All of these could contribute to the rise in burden of long COVID,” he said.
Not all states reported an increase. Massachusetts and Hawaii saw long COVD rates drop slightly, according to the CDC.
A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.