A common trope in long covid papers is to say that “Feature X of long covid lasts _up to_ Y months post-infection.” In literally every instance where I have seen a paper do this, that is incorrect.^[Though I would be very happy to find a paper with some positive news where this was not the case!] What the study actually found is that "we looked at something for Y months, and found that feature X lasted the whole period of time that we looked at it.” Not to pick on these particular authors, but [here's an example of this happening](https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(24)00432-4/abstract) this week with “SARS-CoV-2 antigens can be detected in the blood of a substantial proportion of individuals up to 14 months after infection” where the methods clearly indicate the study only lasted 14 months. While normally I'm not one to get too pedantic about language usage, this choice of words matters because “up to” is long covid minimization language! These articles make it into popular science articles sometimes, and very often the same “up to” usage is parroted there. That means that people who hear about the duration of long covid are actually hearing about the typical length of a long covid study, and not the typical length of long covid problems (presumably considerably longer). This minimizes our collective understanding of the risks and impacts of long covid, and this makes it more difficult for people to understand how it is possible that many of us have symptoms lasting much longer than your typical study. If you're a scientist looking for an equivalently concise alternative, “at least” is a great option. “SARS-CoV-2 antigens can be detected in the blood of a substantial proportion of individuals \[for at least\] 14 months after infection” is the actual result of this paper.