How “long covid” is shedding light on postviral syndromes

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.“There was no real reason to think SARS-CoV-2 should be any different than the original SARS, which also caused post-infection syndromes,” says Lloyd. She is one of many researchers who hope that the attention and funding directed towards long covid will help to shed light on how and why other infections can lead to persistent and sometimes debilitating symptoms.Common symptomsThe list of infectious diseases linked to long term symptoms includes Ebola, West Nile virus, polio, and…
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