Fauci pushes for more long-covid research

Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, has warned against prematurely declaring victory over the pandemic, not only due to short-term needs but because long Covid represents an “insidious” public health emergency for millions of people.

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The World Health Organization estimates that between 10% and 20% of Covid-19 survivors have been left with mid- and long-term symptoms including breathlessness, fatigue and cognitive dysfunction. Fauci noted estimates that anywhere from 7.5 million to 23 million Americans have developed long Covid and roughly 1 million people are out of the workforce at any given time.

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Fauci said: “One of the unfortunate, challenging and frustrating parts about it is that there are so many elements of it that don’t fit into a known or recognisable pathogenic process so, if someone is severely fatigued where they can barely do any work, there is a laboratory test or an X-ray or a CT scan or an MRI that points to something and says, ‘Well, look, there’s inflammation here and that’s the reason for the fatigue.’

“We don’t know what the mechanisms of brain fog are. How come someone who is very sharp intellectually and very energetic all of a sudden can’t concentrate for more than half an hour on anything? And how come people who are polished athletes no longer have any exercise tolerance?”

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“The question we get asked all the time is: what can we do about it? As a physician and a scientist all my professional life, you don’t really know what to do about something until you know what the lesion is and we don’t know what the lesion is yet. That’s the problem.”

Experts are trying to solve the riddle. Both the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where Fauci is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are carrying out major studies.

  Guardian