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This document is an editorial from the Journal of Clinical Medicine, discussing the clinical consequences of COVID-19. It highlights that the respiratory system is most commonly affected by the disease, but other organs such as the neurological, gastrointestinal, and cardiac systems can also be involved. The document emphasizes the complexity of the disease and the wide range of severity it can present. It also mentions the concept of "long covid" or "post-acute COVID-19 syndrome," which refers to the persistence of mild symptoms and disorders after testing negative for the virus. The editorial includes 17 papers that investigate various factors contributing to the clinical complexity of COVID-19, including host-pathogen interactions, different clinical manifestations, and the impact on healthcare systems. It also discusses the influence of virus mutations, demographic characteristics, and lifestyle on the severity of the disease. The document highlights the challenges in clinical management, such as the difficulty in diagnosing bacterial superinfections in critically ill COVID-19 patients. It also addresses the impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems, non-COVID patients, and healthcare personnel. Lastly, the editorial mentions that several articles in the special issue focus on the post-disease and long-term effects of COVID-19, including the quality of life and the physical, psychological, and social effects of the pandemic. [Extracted from the article]

As Fernández-de-las-Peñas and colleagues note, our results also suggest that female sex might be related to a worse HRQOL perception in terms of symptoms after the acute infection, even if the disease is less severe during that phase. We read with interest the original paper by Fernández-de-las-Peñas et al. [[1]], in which they report the results of a multicentre, cross-sectional study aimed at distinguishing the symptoms of COVID-19 in men and women both at presentation and in the long term. Female Sex Is a Risk Factor Associated with Long-Term Post-COVID Related-Symptoms but Not with COVID-19 Symptoms: The LONG-COVID-EXP-CM Multicenter Study. [Extracted from the article]