Long COVID clinics are quietly closing, leaving thousands of patients without specialized care

Holly Broman learned through a letter in late June 2025 that the Post-COVID Care Clinic in Honolulu, where she had been receiving specialty care for long COVID since May 2021, was closing. 

The clinic, which treated over 500 patients with long COVID, shut down on June 30 without explanation and did not respond to multiple requests for a comment.

The letter said that Broman’s provider would see her one more time if she had another appointment scheduled. Then, they would transition care back to her primary care physician (PCP). 

“I was surprised, but not entirely, because I had heard that there were other clinics that were closing,” said Broman, who developed long COVID following her first COVID infection in March 2020 and is disabled. “I was really bummed, because [my doctor] is so great.” Broman’s doctor prescribed her off-label medications that helped. Now, it’s unclear whether her PCP can prescribe them. 

These clinics offer services that most PCPs have trouble getting insurance to cover: cognitive exams, prescriptions for off-label medications, access to clinical trials, and assistance navigating insurance or disability paperwork. 

Broman’s experience of losing access to care is becoming more common. As of April 2025, an estimated 80% of these clinics have shuttered their doors. Since April, at least two more, including the one in Hawaii, have closed. Providers in Texas and New York who treat long COVID said that the closures may stem from funding cuts, provider burnout and the lack of approved treatments.

What is Long COVID?

Long COVID is a chronic condition, with over 200 reported symptoms, including fatigue, flu-like symptoms, an irregular or racing heartbeat, brain fog and headaches. Symptoms may relapse or remit but must be present for at least three months for someone to be diagnosed. Reinfections can also worsen or trigger new symptoms for people with long COVID.

Approximately 10% to 35% of people who have had a COVID infection likely developed long COVID, according to Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, who is the director of the Post-COVID Recovery Clinic at UT Health San Antonio. 

“I have been living with the flu for five and a half years and that flu varies in intensity,” said Gillian McCrea. McCrea developed long COVID following her infection in March 2020. At the time, she lived in New York City and worked for Goldman Sachs. By 2022, she had to go on disability leave, because she was so sick she was “physically crawling on the floor to get to the bathroom twice a day” and unable to care for herself. Eventually, she moved to North Carolina for better weather and health care.

Another Clinic Closes

On June 16, 2025, McCrea’s clinic, the University of North Carolina (UNC) COVID Recovery Clinic, announced that it was closing due to the loss of multiple funding sources. This clinic served over 3,500 patients, 70% of whom are women, according to the UNC School of Medicine.

McCrea received her clinic closure letter in late May. “I was pissed,” McCrea said. The clinic gave McCrea two weeks to decide whether she wanted to try to continue seeing her doctor through UNC’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, or go back to her PCP. She decided to continue seeing him.

“I have a PCP here. She is sympathetic, but she is not versed in long COVID at all,” McCrea said. Despite continuing to see her doctor, McCrea still lost access to prior authorizations and social work support after the clinic closed. 

“I hear from colleagues about clinics, some of them have been closed because their funding depends on the federal government,” said Dr. Hector Bonilla, the head of Stanford’s Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome Clinic, which is still open. UNC’s clinic was not funded by the federal government.

Other Forces

Besides funding cuts, forces like burnout may be driving clinic closures, according to Verduzco-Gutierrez. She co-authored a study showing that providers predominantly caring for long COVID patients are at an elevated risk for burnout — this effect was especially large for doctors who also had the condition. “It’s a tough population to take care of,” Verduzco-Gutierrez said.

With no approved treatments or diagnostic tests, delivering quality medical care for long COVID is challenging, according to Verduzco-Gutierrez. “Doctors like standardized tests and evidence-based medicine,” she said. “It’s hard to do the work. Then, they no longer want to take care of the patient population.” 

In general, medical establishments are pushed to treat simple, manageable conditions over those where treatment options are still developing, said Dr. David Putrino, the Nash Family Director at the Cohen Center for Recovery from Complex Chronic Illnesses in New York City. “Many providers are under pressure from their institutions to treat more lucrative diagnoses.”

Demand for Care 

As centers close, patients are trying to access care at other clinics, leading to increasingly longer wait times.

At the Cohen Center, Putrino said, patients often wait six to eight months for an appointment. 

In San Antonio, wait times for patients have doubled from around two months to four months, as Houston and Dallas also shut down their centers. “It’s overwhelming our clinic,” Verduzco-Gutierrez said. “You have to be able to have primary care doctors treat this.”  

Providers need education, though, said Karyn Bishof, the president and founder of the COVID-19 Long Hauler Advocacy Project: “I think really the biggest thing and the failure of long COVID clinics was them not having the education or resources, period.” 

They do not teach providers about long COVID in medical school, according to Bonilla, who said, “We need to promote education to physicians and education in medical schools.” 

California is the only state to successfully pass legislation that would encourage but not require providers to educate themselves on long COVID and other infection-associated chronic conditions (IACC).

Other states have tried and failed. After Maine’s long COVID clinic closed in 2023, Amy Blackstone, who has long COVID, advocated for a similar bill, which was introduced in the Maine Legislature in April 2025.

The bill would have asked the state medical board to encourage providers to consider continuing medical education focused on IACCs, like long COVID. It died in committee. “The providers were strongly against it, because Maine is a very libertarian state. Nobody’s going to tell anybody what to do,” said Blackstone, who is a member of the Patient Led Research Collaborative, a platform designed by patients to connect other patients to clinical trials and research studies. 

“We lack the funding and resources needed to respond to long COVID at the scale it demands,” Bishof wrote in an email. “Long COVID is our nation’s largest public health threat.” 

The closest precedent is Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. public-private partnership for COVID. It accelerated the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID vaccines, treatments and diagnostics. 

 “We need an Operation Warp Speed for long COVID,” Bishof said.