It was toward the end of my final year at Stanford University in 2023 when a doctor suggested my chronic neurological symptoms — muscle twitches, numbness, tingling, cognitive dysfunction, headaches, and more — might be a sign of Long COVID.
My infection months before came and went mildly, but it soon became obvious that my sluggishness and pain were not caused by caffeine, thesis stress, or hangovers. It was Long COVID.
And my collegiate lifestyle could no longer outpace it. This was not an unusual sequence of events on campus: social media posts, my slew of medical professionals, and the campus newspaper duly noted the prevalence of Long COVID in Stanford students and those students’ trouble seeking care and support.
In 2023, following the end of the federal public health emergency, Stanford University suspended its weekly COVID-19 announcements. Accordingly, they dismantled free on-campus testing and wastewater data collection at university buildings. Today, COVID-19 at Stanford is treated like any other respiratory infection — despite the science showing how Long COVID can affect every organ in the body. There are also no resources available for quarantine.
In 2024, President Jonathan Levin gave opening remarks to a “pandemic policy” conference that platformed COVID-19 deniers and minimizers. They included Marty Makary, now the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who stated that Long COVID was “exaggerated” in 2022. Critiquing the conference in an op-ed, author and researcher Rena Rudy argues that Stanford cannot justify spreading COVID-19 misinformation by gesturing toward academic freedom.
The reality is far more mundane: student health is being offered up as collateral to usher in “business as usual.”
The reality is far more mundane: student health is being offered up as collateral to usher in “business as usual.”
Dismantling COVID-19 support infrastructure paves the way for more infections and reinfections for students, compounding their risk of Long COVID. The pandemic is far from over — these consequences cannot be sustained. If colleges and universities like Stanford want to claim they nurture young adults, it is imperative that they work to prevent and treat Long COVID. Especially because the disease often is harsher on younger adults.
In 2022, Stanford grad Ravi Reviah Jacques shared his experience with COVID-induced myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) in The Guardian. He described how symptoms like fatigue and cognitive dysfunction devastated his sense of identity and belonging. Ravi struggled to reconcile his past life — Schwarzman Scholar, brilliant academic — with the homebound life he lived two years out from graduation. As of 2025, not much has improved for Ravi.
His story is strikingly similar to mine. I also graduated from Stanford with a degree in history and was on the cusp of a career in academia before Long COVID derailed my plans. Our common neurological symptoms — which some studies say are comparable to the aftermath of brain injury — betrayed our deepest selves. One year into Long COVID, I asked my parents to take down my graduation portrait. Its presence was too alien and painful.
But while our stories with Long COVID and ME read like an aberration, the reality is much more ubiquitous, the matter much more urgent.
A Northwestern Medicine study indicates that neurological Long COVID — the kind that I suffer from — may hit young adults harder, regardless of acute severity. Another small study focusing on undergraduate students found that 37% of participants had cognitive impairment 17 months out from infection. Both conclusions urge more scientists to study prevention, diagnosis, and intervention as the burden of neurological Long COVID increases in this age group. Medical researchers have sounded the alarm.
Why haven’t universities heeded this advice? Administrators and outside commentators denounce masks, our most intuitive tool against SARS-CoV-2 infection, as backlash to widespread pro-Palestine student protests. In summer 2024, the University of California system banned masks that people wear intending to conceal their identity, as did the University of Virginia. And this year Columbia followed suit, capitulating to demands from the Trump administration. Trump’s later letter to Harvard University called for a comprehensive mask ban in its list of demands.
Of course, there is no real way to determine why someone is wearing a mask — that is by design.
University administrators don’t acknowledge that, in fact, the right to mask is linked to expression; the right to an education without the risk of chronic illness is linked to accessibility. If universities took action on Long COVID, it would demonstrate that protecting student health is a priority for universities, and that institutions should function to stand by the people that compose them writ large.
Making student health a priority would look a lot like restoring what we already knew worked: comprehensive COVID-19 prevention through free masks, tests, and adequate resources for quarantine. Perhaps even “right to mask” laws and guidelines. Additional tools like easily accessible wastewater collection data, accommodations for virtual programming, anonymous self-reporting. Clear protocols for professors and students, prioritizing rest over work after an infection to reduce the likelihood of Long COVID.
Making student health a priority would look a lot like restoring what we already knew worked: comprehensive COVID-19 prevention through free masks, tests, and adequate resources for quarantine.
It also, in turn, would look like care following COVID-19. After my SARS-CoV-2 infection on Stanford’s campus, the primary points of help for my chronic symptoms became the emergency room and Twitter/X. In lieu of some elusive referral to the university’s Long COVID clinic, I could seek only either acute attention or vague recovery tips.
In retrospect, it was astonishing to me how I could live mere yards away from a prominent Long COVID clinic — Stanford’s Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome (PACS) Clinic — with such limited, nebulous access to it.
Many other university research centers and hospitals are similarly siloed from their undergraduate student populations. Strengthening these links is vital. The same applies to other forms of Long COVID care, specifically in offering more direct pathways to primary care follow-up and disability accommodations. The Office of Accessible Education at Stanford, for example, contains scarce information on its webpage concerning COVID-19 beyond 2020, despite the fact that Long COVID can be recognized as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Most importantly, prioritizing student health means transforming how universities respond to Long COVID from individual defense to collective care. Securing clean air in university spaces through HEPA filtration, CO2 monitors, and ventilation shifts the onus for reducing transmission. Educating campus communities on how COVID-19 spreads — especially the debunked idea of herd immunity — is key. Herd immunity was among the ideas espoused by COVID-19 contrarians at the aforementioned Pandemic Policy conference at Stanford.
At a recent Faculty Senate meeting, Stanford president Jonathan Levin defended his decision not to sign a joint statement with other colleges and universities condemning the Trump administration’s higher education policies. But if anything can be learned from disjointed COVID-19 policy across the academic world, universities standing alone only leaves students exposed. Coordinated responses between institutions are vital to ensuring student expression and access amid hostile actors. All students should have the right to mask. All students should have the right to clean classroom air. All students should have a right to participate in college without risking Long COVID.
If political issues continue to be litigated on the campuses of universities across the country, they will continue to set precedent for future COVID-19 policy. As such, it is imperative to pay attention and resist. The consequences otherwise are too somber: the burden of Long COVID, spread and compounded on our population, systems, and communities. More young people trudging through life as did I, at my worst: betrayed by youth’s promise of vitality and growth.
It is imperative to pay attention and resist. The consequences otherwise are too somber: the burden of Long COVID, spread and compounded on our population, systems, and communities.
Stephanie Castaneda Perez is a Stanford history alum and writer who has been living with Long COVID for two years. She is passionate about leveraging her training as an academic researcher, writer, and archivist to document the Long COVID crisis, among other linked issues. She has written for Dazed and keeps a Substack, mexicofiber.
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