COVID-19 isn't going away. That's not to say it's become any more dangerous. But the virus keeps mutating and the current iteration of COVID-19 is more contagious than any other mutation seen since 2022.
No lockdowns or school closures are necessary. But research into the disease generally referred to as "Long COVID" needs to be increased. A recent Nature Medicine review this week found that at least 400 million people worldwide have been afflicted with Long COVID resulting in an economic cost of $1 trillion.
Not much is known about Long COVID. In fact, scientists and researchers have identified more than 200 symptoms they believe are associated with Long COVID but aren't sure what the underlying pathology is. Yale researchers identified proteins in patients suffering from many of the major symptoms of Long COVID. But there's no test nor is there a treatment for Long COVID.
And that's a problem for many of us.
"There is no single test to diagnose Long COVID. Doctors diagnose it, in large part, based on a patient's history of COVID-19 and by ruling out other possible causes of their symptoms," reports Yale.
Normal precautions against catching any respiratory disease are good enough to protect against the COVID0-19 virus. But early on in the pandemic, researchers realized that patients who had recovered from COVID-19 suffered debilitating weakness, and/or extreme exhaustion, and other long-term effects like heart disease, and diabetes that refuse to dissipate. Indeed, about the only thing that researchers believe with any certainty is that the more someone is infected with COVID-19, the more likely they are to contract Long COVID.
The reason we know so little about Long COVID is that the dollars are not being poured into research about what it is and how to treat it. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent 2.5 years and spent $1 billion and failed to test any meaningful Long COVID treatments. The NIH's Long COVID initiative known as RECOVER studied "only a handful of pharmaceutical treatments, along with several behavioral options" according to STAT News.
These treatments won't address the underlying biological issues of Long COVID, meaning the NIH's RECOVER was a gigantic waste of time and money.
“Nobody in the patient community or the research community thinks this is going to be sufficient to solve the problem,” said Charlie McCone, a long Covid advocate and patient representative for RECOVER. “And there’s been no indication that there will be funding for further trials.”
Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation that would fund RECOVER or something like it to the tune of a billion dollars a year for a decade. But given that Long COVID is not a high priority for either party, the bill faces an uphill climb.
“The legislation that we have introduced finally recognizes that long COVID is a public health emergency,” Sanders said. “Congress must act now to ensure treatments are developed and made available for Americans struggling with long COVID.”
The Catch-22 of research into Long COVID is that more money won't become available unless people become aware of the disease. And more people won't hear about Long COVID until scientists and researchers are able to study it more thoroughly.
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