Persistence of various symptoms in patients who recovered from COVID-19 was recently defined as long COVID or post-COVID syndrome (PCS). We report a case of a 58-year-old woman who, although recovering from COVID-19, has novel and persistent symptoms such as neurological complications, not explained by another cause apart from PCS. In addition to a low inflammatory response, we found a persistence of IgG aCL positivity and eosinopenia, one year after the COVID-19 acute infection, both previously defined as independent factors associated with disease severity. The pathophysiological mechanism of PCS is not known, but the possibility of persistence of the virus, especially in the nervous system, could be suggested, with a post-infectious inflammatory or autoimmune reaction.

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Specificities of COVID-19 disease course in patients with haematologic malignancies are still poorly studied. So, we aimed to compare patients with haematologic malignancies to patients without malignancies, matched by sex and age and hospitalised for COVID-19 at the same time and in the same centre. Among 25 patients with haematologic malignancies, we found that mortality (40% versus 4%, p < 0.01), number of days with RT-PCR positivity (21.2 ± 15.9 days [range, 3–57] versus 7.4 ± 5.6 days [range, 1–24], p < 0.01), maximal viral load (mean minimal Ct, 17.2 ± 5.2 [range, 10–30] versus 26.5 ± 5.1 [range, 15–33], p < 0.0001) and the delay between symptom onset and clinical worsening (mean time duration between symptom onset and first day of maximum requirement in inspired oxygen fraction, 14.3 ± 10.7 days versus 9.6 ± 3.7 days, p = 0.0485) were higher than in other patients. COVID-19 course in patients with haematologic malignancies has a delayed onset and is more severe with a higher mortality, and patients may be considered as super-spreaders. Clinicians and intensivists need to be trained to understand the specificity of COVID-19 courses in patients with haematological malignancies. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00277-021-04656-z.