Over the past two years, its become more and more difficult to dodge COVID-19, especially as the virus has mutated to become more contagious. We know that high-quality masks help and vaccination drastically reduces our odds of contracting the coronavirus and developing serious illness.

But given the nature of extremely contagious respiratory viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, infectious disease specialists say that most of us will, at some point, get infected. And as the reality of living with endemic COVID sets in, many of us have grown increasingly concerned about getting long COVID if and when that infection occurs.

Because doctors are still researching what causes long COVID in the first place, we dont have any treatments specifically designed to prevent long COVID. As of now, the best way to prevent a lingering case of COVID aside from not getting COVID in the first place is to get vaccinated and start treatment as soon as possible if you do get sick.

Vaccination and possibly early use of oral antiviral drugs are the most tangible and science-based means to prevent long COVID, said Richard Becker , an internal medicine physician at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine who is running the UC Health long COVID clinic .

Where were at with understanding what causes and prevents long COVID

Because COVID is a relatively new disease thats been around for only a couple of years, scientists dont yet have a solid understanding of what causes long COVID or how to prevent it.

Researchers who study long COVID generally agree that the lingering health effects people experience after their infection are caused by inflammation throughout the body. Others suspect that people with long-haul symptoms still have small amounts of virus in their bodies that may trigger all sorts of health issues, including fatigue, dizziness, brain fog, tremors and chest or joint pain.

We also know that a lot of long COVID patients started out really sick with COVID.

Just by the nature of being really sick, a lot of patients will have lingering symptoms like fatigue and shortness of breath, said Jean Paul Higuero-Sevilla , a critical care physician at Yale Medicine who works in the facilitys Post-COVID-19 Recovery Program .

Were in the early stages of understanding long COVID, and as of now there isnt a treatment specifically designed to prevent it.

Figuring out the path of physiology is going to be key to understanding, No. 1, what can be done perhaps to prevent long COVID, and, No. 2, to get us some leads on how to effectively treat long COVID, which currently we dont really have, said Sally Hodder , an infectious disease physician and the director of the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute at West Virginia University.