Thursday, October 1, 2026
What if we told you that in every school district across Long Island, an average of 200 students are silently suffering from a condition that has left them barely able to get out of bed? That these children miss school at more than twice the rate of their peers? That they are twice as likely to struggle to learn, concentrate and remember?
What if we told you that these students suffer from depression at three times the rate of their healthy schoolmates? That, unlike the flu, their illness doesn’t dissipate with rest and time, and in many cases gets worse? That it can take months or years for a family to find a doctor who understands the disorder — and that when they do, that doctor often has no treatment to offer?
If we told you a crisis of that scale was playing out in every Long Island school district, you would expect emergency meetings of school boards, action from Albany and, at minimum, that someone in a position of authority was paying attention.
Yet, tragically, this crisis is real, and almost no one is paying attention.
An estimated 25,000 children across Long Island are living with long Covid — the little-understood condition that develops when a Covid-19 infection does not fully resolve. Formally known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, it is defined as symptoms that persist or newly arise more than three months after infection — and many of the 23 million Americans with long Covid have been suffering for over half a decade.
“Long haulers” experience a unique combination of more than 200 potential symptoms, including crushing fatigue, brain fog, heart palpitations, pain with no clear origin, and immune dysfunction that standard blood tests cannot detect. The National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER Initiative determined that roughly 4 percent of children who contracted Covid-19 later develop the condition — translating to 200 students per district in Long Island’s 125 school districts. And because Covid continues to circulate, new cases are being added every day.
Harvard economists have estimated the total cost of long Covid to the United States at $3.7 trillion. For a family with a seriously affected child, navigating years of visits to specialists, lost parental income and insurance companies that routinely deny claims, the financial burden can easily reach six figures. This is not a minor post-pandemic inconvenience. It is one of the largest ongoing public health and economic crises in American history.
A situation of this magnitude should be impossible to miss. School boards should have data. Superintendents should have plans. Doctors should have answers. Instead, these children are largely invisible — and the reasons are worth understanding. Long Covid carries no definitive diagnostic test, its symptoms overlap with conditions doctors are quicker to define, and families often spend a year or more cycling through specialists without answers. Many of these families suffer quietly at home, unaware of others going through the same thing, with no community, no organized voice, no constituency demanding to be heard.
Parents describe a particular kind of helplessness. They watch a child who was active, engaged and social withdraw from everything that once defined them. They fight insurance companies, drain savings and search online late at night for anything that might help. They sometimes pursue ineffective — and dangerous — therapies offered by unscrupulous people preying on their desperation. More than anything, they wait for a return to normalcy that medicine has not yet figured out how to deliver.
Teachers watch capable students quietly disappear. The hand that was always first in the air goes still, and half-done work replaces finished assignments. Without the training to recognize the symptoms of long Covid, too many educators mistake it for disengagement or a behavioral problem. It is neither.
Children are being left behind in ways that cannot always be recovered — the reading level never reached, the travel team never made, the Homecoming never attended, the college essay never written. Childhood has a timeline, and long Covid does not respect it.
If your child has been struggling since a Covid infection — however mild or even asymptomatic — long Covid may be the explanation no one has yet offered. Ask your pediatrician. Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital, Northwell Health and Stony Brook University Hospital all have long Covid clinics — world-class resources waiting to help, right in our backyard.
This Sunday, March 15, is Long Covid Awareness Day. But awareness without action is futile. So let’s commit to making this the year long Covid gets the recognition, coverage and funding it so sorely needs. Our children deserve nothing less.
Are you or your child suffering from long Covid? We want to hear your story, which we will keep anonymous. Email us at longcovid@liherald.com.
