They all crop up disproportionately in people who suffer from long-term COVID. Then, there’s the hardest part: they have to prove that each of these traits can easily explain why the coronavirus rendered millions of people shadows of their former selves.
However, they all agree on one thing: the chances of solo operators are close to zero. A lingering virus, for instance, could easily attack the circulatory system, triggering blood clots and chronic inflammation. It could be seen as a triangle, as we rapidly learned from Buonsenso, as each trigger can explain and amplify the others. Another challenge was identifying treatments that could ease and reverse the abnormalities while also helping patients feel much better.
In the United Kingdom, for instance, which is home to praised efforts to discover immediate COVID-19 treatments, researchers and scientists developed a clinical trial (one of the biggest ones yet) that will test the potential long-term COVID therapies in a randomized and statistically robust manner.
However, more studies need to be done, and time is essential in this situation. As it turns out, one in five people who got diagnosed with COVID-19 soon developed conditions that were characteristic of long COVID.
Additional studies showed roughly similar rates, and recent research proved that the risk for vaccinated people is much lower, even if the power of the vaccination is still uncertain. Here are some of the causes of long-term COVID that we should all be concerned about: