COVID-19 offers researchers their best chance yet to understand, and find treatments for, a chronic illness associated with an infectious disease.
Infection-associated chronic conditions are not widely understood. Partly because of this, people who develop such conditions often face scepticism and stigma; health-care systems are ill-equipped to deal with them; and cases are likely to be under-reported. When it comes to COVID-19, millions of previously healthy people were infected with SARS-CoV-2 at the same time, and many of those infections were confirmed through testing. Patient-advocacy groups and the media highlighted that symptoms persisted1 in some of these people, and governments globally started to invest in programmes to tackle what, by late 2020, was understood to be a widespread infection-associated chronic condition — long COVID.
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, we have been on the front lines of care, research and advocacy concerning long COVID — defined here as symptoms, such as cognitive dysfunction, fatigue, breathlessness and pain, that persist for months or years after SARS-CoV-2 infection. On many fronts, progress in the past three years has been impressive. But we are increasingly worried that the momentum will not hold.
Research on long COVID continues to be uncoordinated, with many researchers and clinicians communicating only with other experts from their own field, be they pulmonologists, neurologists or cardiologists, for example. Few clinical trials are testing interventions that