Professional tennis player Emma Raducanu has post-viral syndrome. And commentators are giving her terrible advice.

Many viruses can trigger chronic diseases. So far, Raducanu has shared limited details on her illness.

During a tennis tournament this February in Cluj, Romania, professional tennis player Emily Raducanu likely contracted a virus.

In the weeks following, the 2021 U.S. Open champion has had to pull out of numerous tournaments around the world, including the recent Madrid Open. Raducanu’s last match was in early March during a tournament in Indian Wells, California, where she lost in the third round to Amanda Anisimova.

Raducanu has stated she is experiencing prolonged symptoms following a viral illness but has not disclosed the exact virus as she had when she developed COVID-19 in December 2021. Last fall, the 23-year old also pulled out of a tournament citing an unspecified “illness.”

“I picked up like a virus, I think, at the start of the [Cluj] tournament. So I was dealing with that and the after-effects,” she told The Guardian in February. “I had really long effects for the last three weeks. I’ve been trying to clear them.”

British sports journalist Gigi Salmon later said that Raducanu’s team stated she had a “chest infection” in Romania, but there were no further specifics. There are many different types of chest infections, a general term for an illness in which a pathogen affects the airways or lungs. Some include bronchitis, COVID-19, influenza, and pneumonia.

After going public with her illness, Raducanu has since been in the headlines of many sports and U.K. publications, with commentators largely offering terrible training advice to someone in a vulnerable and uncertain period of a viral illness. 

Former British player Greg Rusedski said the number 27-ranked player should “get healthy” and “get back on court.” Thousands of research papers on Long COVID and related diseases suggest improvement is far from that simple. Other media have ignored the potential reality of post-viral syndrome altogether, stating she should skip clay court season and focus on grass court season, just a couple months away. It is clear much of the media has failed to learn important public health messages in discussing viral illnesses that we’ve gleaned from Long COVID and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Post-viral illness, more commonly called post-viral syndrome (PVS), is a catch-all term for the many different sequelae that can follow a viral infection. According to the Cleveland Clinic, PVS is sometimes considered the “early stage” of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a debilitating, multi-systemic disease. The term PVS is often used when the pathogen is not known or named and symptoms persist for weeks, but do not yet meet the clinical definitions of chronic diseases, which often require a few months or more of prolonged symptoms.

Many researchers and providers have recently begun to use more specific terms like post-acute infection syndrome (PAIS), instead. Some viruses, like Epstein Barr, can remain in the body, causing long term symptoms or triggering chronic diseases. In other words, they aren’t “post-viral”; the virus remains. A growing body of research has also found that SARS-CoV-2 may persist in the bodies of some people with Long COVID.

Some researchers and medical providers also use the term infection-associated chronic condition (IACC) or infection-associated chronic disease (IACD), as it isn’t just viruses that can lead to chronic disease. So can pathogens like bacteria, mold, and parasites.

Long COVID is one of the most well-known IACCs today, with more than 400 million people affected around the world. The crisis has been called a mass disabling event and can impact anyone, including high-performance athletes. Some Winter Olympians recognized the effects COVID-19 and other illnesses could have on their performance or career and rightfully took precautionary measures at the 2026 games despite stigma from the media.

Long COVID has led to further recognition of other IACCs since it was named by people with the disease in 2020. Many pathogens can also trigger forms of dysautonomia like postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a common co-diagnosis of Long COVID. That debilitating syndrome, which can cause extreme dizziness, fainting, and a rapid heart rate, has sidelined professional basketball player Kristaps Porziņģis for nearly a year.

It is worth stating explicitly that Raducanu has not said that she contracted COVID-19 in February, or that she has Long COVID. Long COVID is diagnosed after three months of health issues following a SARS-CoV-2 infection according to official definitions. ME is typically diagnosed after six months of a specific set of chronic symptoms, including post-exertional malaise. Without more information it is difficult to know exactly what Raducanu is dealing with. 

The uncertainty she currently faces mirrors the plight many people face after infections. While some people with post-viral syndromes recover, others can develop disabling, lifelong illnesses that do not have approved treatments. Due to lack of accessible testing, asymptomatic illnesses, and poor provider knowledge of IACCs, some people cannot trace their chronic symptoms to specific infections, leaving them in the dark for care, treatments, and support. It also leaves them vulnerable to gaslighting and stigma.

One of Raducanu’s fellow British competitors, Tanysha Dissanayake, had to retire from professional tennis at the age of 21 after developing Long COVID. 

The two played in the same tournament in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. “I just didn’t want to accept that my career was ending so soon because of COVID, because of a virus so out of my control, but I think eventually I got to a point where I was like, I’m 15 months in, I’m still housebound, still mostly bedbound, unable to do most basic things,” Dissanayake told The Times in 2022.

While much is still unclear about Raducanu’s case, one thing is for certain: many experts recommend resting as much as possible following infections as “pushing through” could drastically worsen an infection-associated chronic disease.

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