Living with Long COVID in a Southern State: A Comparison of Black and White Residents of North Carolina

William Pilkington, Brooke E. Bauer and Irene A. Doherty ()
Additional contact information
William Pilkington: Julius L. Chambers Biomedical and Biotechnology Research Institute, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC 27707, USA
Brooke E. Bauer: Julius L. Chambers Biomedical and Biotechnology Research Institute, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC 27707, USA
Irene A. Doherty: Julius L. Chambers Biomedical and Biotechnology Research Institute, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC 27707, USA

IJERPH, 2025, vol. 22, issue 2, 1-12

Abstract: Long COVID can devastate patients’ overall quality of life, extending to economic, psychosocial, and mental health and day-to-day activities. Clinical research suggests that long COVID is more severe among Black and African American populations in the United States. This study examines the lived and lasting effects of long COVID among a diverse sample of North Carolina residents over one year by using three self-administered questionnaires completed online using Qualtrics. A cross-sectional descriptive analysis of the baseline results is presented. Our study recruited 258 adults, of which 51.5% had long COVID (but may have recovered), 32.3% had a COVID-19 infection at least once, and 16.3% had never had COVID-19. The socioeconomic status of Black participants was lower than that of White participants; however, the economic impact of long COVID was not worse. Across both groups, 64.4% were employed, 28.8% had to change tasks or work less, and 19.8% stopped working. Fewer White (32.6%) than Black (54.8%) participants always/often felt supported by family and friends about having long COVID. The majority of White participants (59.1%) reported that they did not recover from long COVID compared to 29.7% of Black participants. The long COVID/COVID-19 experience affected White and Black participants differently, but both populations continue feel the impacts.

Keywords: long COVID; minority populations; social determinants; disparities; lived experience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/2/279/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/2/279/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:22:y:2025:i:2:p:279-:d:1591156

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().