Experts Remain Divided on Long COVID Treatments
Summary from the AllSides News Team
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers remain divided on long COVID and how to cure its symptoms.
The CDC currently defines post-COVID conditions as a wide range of ongoing health problems that can last weeks, months or years after an initial COVID-19 infection. One recent study from King’s College London identified three different "subtypes" of long COVID that affect different body systems: neurological symptoms (brain fog or headaches), respiratory symptoms (chest pain or shortness of breath) and immune-related symptoms (heart palpitations or muscle pains). About one in eight (12.7%) of people diagnosed with COVID-19 reported longstanding symptoms at least three months after their initial diagnosis, according to a report from The Lancet. Nature.com (Center bias) suggested in a recent feature that researchers are conducting at least 26 randomized trials to test therapies for long-COVID. The report accentuated one immunologist who compared long COVID research to the Wild West and noted that most of the trials being conducted are too small in scale to provide precise results. Axios (Center bias) noted that the ambiguity around long COVID has prompted doctors to "repurpose older drugs developed for other conditions."
Reports across the spectrum were divided on how significant a threat long COVID poses. While some reports labeled long COVID estimates as "startlingly high" and "pretty scary," others downplayed the data as "smaller" than initial suggestions and claimed that the Omicron variant might lead to long COVID "only half as often" as Delta did.
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