Now that vaccines and therapeutics have lessened the chance of severe illness and death and people are eager to return to normal life, is the threat of long covid an ongoing reason to avoid contracting the virus? Others wonder: Could endemic covid leave millions disabled with long-haul symptoms every year, creating a growing public health crisis?
Or, if researchers put the recovery process from this new disease under closer scrutiny, could they expose patterns and even find treatments common to other post-infectious conditions?
Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale immunologist and principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute… lists five hypotheses that she believes could explain the biological underpinning of long covid. Top among them is what she calls a “viral reservoir” of persistent virus or viral remnants in the body that cause chronic inflammation. Autoimmune disease could also be triggered by the coronavirus, Iwasaki believes.
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Such approaches are “likely relevant to all post-viral syndromes,” Iwasaki said, and could also explain lingering symptoms after infections with bacteria or parasites. They can potentially be treated, either by targeting the virus or by suppressing the body’s immune system.
