For clinicians, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a battlefield experience that has brought rapid changes to virtually all aspects of medicine. And for COVID-19 survivors, the effects of the pandemic could last a lifetime whether they had severe disease or mild infection.

Clinical Year in Review 4, 9:30–11 a.m. PT on Wednesday, May 18, will include an exploration of post-ICU syndromes in COVID-19 patients and the broader topic of long COVID. The session will take place in Hall E (North Building, Exhibition Level), Moscone Center.

“Early in the COVID pandemic, we had to focus on acute COVID, finding better treatments, better ways to help patients survive and recover, and now we’re putting that same effort into understanding the long-term effects of the disease,” Jose L. Gomez, MD, MS, associate professor of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine, Yale University School of Medicine. “Just because you survived the ICU, or even a mild, asymptomatic COVID infection, doesn’t mean your health problems are over.”

Dr. Gomez will co-chair the final session of the ATS Clinical Year in Review with Rupal J. Shah, MD, MSCE, associate professor of pulmonary, critical care, allergy, and sleep medicine, University of California San Francisco, and Juliana C. Ferreira, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine, University of São Paulo, Brazil.

COVID-19 has exacted an obvious toll on patients, their caregivers, and health care providers, Dr. Gomez noted.

Kimberley J. Haines, PhD, BHS, physiotherapy research lead, senior critical care physiotherapist, and honorary clinical associate professor of critical care, University of Melbourne, Australia, will discuss the latest findings in post-ICU care needs for patients who survived severe COVID-19 but remain hospitalized. She also will discuss the latest assessments of the patient populations at greatest risk for long-term COVID-19 sequelae and current approaches to identification and treatment.

Stacey M. Kassutto, MD, assistant professor of clinical medicine, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, will discuss the latest findings in the surprising — and not so surprising — ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected medical education. She also will explain the latest findings on diversity in medical education and the ways that lack of diversity has perpetuated inequalities in medical education.

Joseph C. Cicenia, MD, critical care pulmonologist at Cleveland Clinic, will discuss the latest developments in interventional pulmonology.

Kusum Sara Mathews, MD, MPH, MSCR, associate professor of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine and emergency medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will explore developments in acute respiratory distress syndrome.

“The COVID-19 pandemic experience has transformed ARDS — everything from new classification methods to new data on rescue therapies such as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and advances in mechanical ventilatory support for respiratory failure,” Dr. Gomez said. “This final session of the Year in Review touches on areas that are of vital importance to every clinician who deals with lung disease, whatever their specialty or workplace.”