The global burden of long covid has put a spotlight on the long neglected mystery of postviral syndromes. Brian Owens asks what’s changing
Long covid really shouldn’t have been a surprise, says Vett Lloyd, a biologist at Mount Allison University in Sackville, Canada. “When the pandemic started, the general assumption was that there were two possible outcomes to an infection—you’d either get better or die,” she says.
But there’s a possible third outcome. It’s long been known that a number of disease causing pathogens—some viral and some bacterial—are associated with ongoing post-infection symptoms in a significant minority of patients. Read more in BMJ.