More information about who may be most likely to get a long-lasting illness has been found by looking at data from 4,700 people who have recovered from COVID-19. Scientists still don’t know exactly what causes the painful symptoms of long COVID—there are hundreds of possible causes—but this new study gives them a better idea of who may be affected.

If you get infected with SARS-CoV-2, you will have a long-term condition called Long COVID for at least three months. The symptoms may get worse over time or come on and off in waves. Some people will get better after a while, but for others, whose symptoms started in the early days of the pandemic in 2020 and haven’t gone away yet, they are still sick.

A lot of work has been done by scientists to figure out what causes long-term COVID and to find treatments that might help, not just for these patients but also for people with other post-viral syndromes. There are still a lot of things we don’t know, though. One of the biggest questions is who may be most likely to get long-term COVID. Someone at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center may have led a new study that could help.

“Our study clearly establishes that COVID posed a substantial personal and societal burden,” said Professor Elizabeth C. Oelsner, who wrote the study and was the lead author. “By figuring out who was most likely to have had a long recovery, we have a better idea of who should be involved in ongoing research into how to lessen or stop the long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

The 4,700 people who took part in the study agreed to be a part of the Collaborative Cohort of Cohorts for COVID-19 Research, or C4R. C4R is made up of more than 50,000 people from all over the US who are doing long-term research to help us learn as much as we can about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The people who took part were asked to say how long it took them to get better after getting COVID. The average time to get better from an infection between 2020 and 2023 was 20 days, and more than one in five adults had symptoms for at least three months.

The biggest groups of those were found to be women and people who already had heart disease. American Indian and Alaska Native people who took part also had more severe first infections and took longer to recover.

Being vaccinated against the virus and having an infection with an omicron lineage variant, which is usually linked to milder disease, were both linked to a faster recovery. She said, “Our study shows how important it is that COVID vaccinations have been, not only in lowering the severity of an infection but also in lowering the risk of long-term COVID.”

Other health problems that are usually linked to worse outcomes from COVID, like diabetes and chronic lung disease, were linked to longer recovery times. However, this was no longer a statistically significant finding when sex, heart disease, vaccination status, and variant exposure were taken into account.

The study also found an interesting lack of a significant link with mental health disorders. Studies have shown that a lot of people with long COVID have problems with their mental health, but Oelsner said, “We did not find that depressive symptoms before SARS-CoV-2 infection were a major risk factor for long COVID.”

The main thing to remember is that getting vaccinated is still the best way to avoid getting COVID in the first place, so make sure you don’t have a worse experience with it. The current circulating variants are mostly offshoots of Omicron. This may also be a reason to be hopeful, since these variants were linked to shorter recovery times.

New vaccines are being made to match the newest strains, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts out detailed information on when people of different ages and risk levels should think about getting their next booster. Different countries have different vaccine availability, but the health authority in your area should be able to tell you if you can get a shot.

The study can be found in JAMA Network Open.

Some of the diagrams and animations that show how the planets move around the sun are not quite accurate. To be more precise, they are making the planets’ orbits easier to understand so that teachers don’t have to explain barycenters to kids who are still getting used to the idea that Earth isn’t the only planet in the universe.

Most of the time, the way you learn about how planets move around the sun looks like the video below.

But this version is easier to understand. The Sun has about 1,048 times the mass of Jupiter, making it the largest object in the Solar System. However, gravity works both ways. For the same reason that the Earth pulls on itself, you pull on the Earth as well, though it is much smaller.

“Kepler’s third law describes the relationship between the masses of two objects mutually revolving around each other and the determination of orbital parameters,” NASA says.

“Think about a small star that circles a bigger star. The two stars actually move around the same mass center, which is called the barycenter. That’s always the case, no matter how big or heavy the things are. Using a massive planet to measure how fast a star moves around its barycenter is one way that planetary systems linked to faraway stars have been found.

To keep things simple, we say that the planets go around the Sun. But because the Sun has the most mass, the barycenter of the Solar System’s objects is usually close to it. However, because of Jupiter and Saturn’s orbits and effects, it is almost never inside the Sun. The paths look a bit more like the video below, which was made by planetary astronomer and science communicator James O’Donoghue.

Because of this, the Earth is not orbiting a point inside the Sun right now because the barycenter is not there. We are not going around the sun, but that point in space.

“Planets orbit the Sun in general terms,” O’Donoghue says on Twitter, “but technically, they don’t orbit the Sun alone because the gravitational influence of (mainly) Jupiter means planets must orbit a new point in space.”

“The planets do orbit the Sun, of course; we are just being pedantic about the situation,” he said. “The natural thinking is that we orbit the Sun’s center, but that very rarely happens, i.e., it’s very rare for the solar system’s center of mass to align with the Sun’s center.”

Things that are smaller, like planets and their moons, are the same way. The Earth and Moon go around a point about 3,100 miles (5,100 kilometers) from the Earth’s center. This path changes as the moon moves farther away from the earth.

This week, it looks like it will be very hot in the US because the first big heatwave of the season is starting. During the first half of the week, it could get as hot as all-time highs in parts of the Midwest, Great Lakes, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic. Extreme temperatures that will last for so long in some places haven’t happened in decades.

From the Ohio Valley to the Northeast, many daily high-temperature records and even some monthly records for June could be broken. High temperatures in some places are expected to reach up to 40.5 °C (105 °F).

Record-breaking #heat is forecast to expand from the Midwest and Great Lakes to the Northeast this week, potentially lingering through early next week. The duration of this heat wave is notable and potentially the longest experienced in decades for some locations. pic.twitter.com/4nJ1PS4qih

— NWS Weather Prediction Center (@NWSWPC) June 16, 2024

US residents will also have to deal with heavy rain, flash flooding, snow, and storms in different parts of the country. High temperatures aren’t the only weather problem that will happen.

The National Weather Service (NWS) says that in the new week, there will be “heavy wet snow across the northern Rockies.” Deep tropical moisture is also expected to move ashore across the Gulf Coast States, which could mean heavy rain. This danger goes all the way to the upper Midwest, where flash flooding and a few big storms are likely to happen.

The heatwave will now move from the central Plains to the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and the Northeast today. It will stay in the Northeast through the middle of the week, according to the most recent report from the NWS’s Weather Prediction Center.

Over the next few days, a low-pressure system is expected to move across the central High Plains and get stronger as it moves toward and reaches the upper Midwest. The Weather Prediction Center says that “a heat wave is quickly emerging” ahead of this low-pressure system.

The heat will move into the Northeast by Tuesday. As far north as Vermont and New Hampshire, high temperatures will reach well into the 90s [90°F/32°C]. Some places in the middle of New England could see temperatures above 100 °F (38 °C) by Wednesday afternoon. In some places, this would be a daily record high.

Axios says this means that by Sunday, the air will have reached or been above 32°C (90°F) in 268 million places.

In the Four Corners region of the southwestern US, on the other hand, “critical fire danger conditions are anticipated today under persistently dry conditions.”

As the NWS points out, heat is the main cause of weather-related deaths in the US. Because of this, they want people to take the heatwave seriously and be careful, especially older people, pregnant women and babies, and people who already have persistent health problems. See the NWS’s helpful guides for tips on how to stay safe in the heat.