evidence: Queensland's CHO believes the symptoms of long COVID are real — but he wants people to stop calling it that [...] Given this research, and myriad of other long COVID studies, Queensland Chief Health Officer John Gerrard's plea yesterday for the scrapping of the term long COVID may seem controversial. [...] "Using this term long COVID implies that this virus has some unique, exceptional, and sinister property that differentiates it from other viruses and makes it far worse.