The Queensland Chief Health Officer’s call to scrap the term ‘long COVID’ is “dangerous” and based on an “oversimplification” of the available evidence, say doctors working at long COVID clinics.

Last week, Queensland’s top doctor Dr John Gerrard said the post-acute sequalae of COVID-19 were no different from those seen with influenza and that the use of terms like long COVID caused “unnecessary fear”.

“They wrongly imply there is something unique and exceptional about longer term symptoms associated with this virus,” he said in a media statement about an observational study he co-authored.

The study involving 5100 symptomatic adults showed that those with COVID-19 were no more likely to develop moderate or severe functional impairment a year later than those with influenza or who tested negative for both viruses.