No one knows how the story of long Covid will play out.
Few, if any, health systems around the world are prepared to deal with long Covid. It will have a profound social and economic impact on the community.
The major gaps in our understanding of long Covid's are who it affects, why and how, and how these gaps are making it difficult to treat those with the syndrome.
Some solutions are obvious, such as better diagnostic criteria, better testing, better clinical trials and individualised treatments. It's important that you don't get sick in the first place. The effects of the mass disabling event will be mitigated by those solutions.
Eight experts from around the world are talking about the future of Covid.
Long covid is not easy to understand. The symptoms of long Covid include brain fog, fatigue, and an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic diseases.
There are a lot of conditions that will scar people for the rest of their lives if they are not treated. People want to talk about fatigue all the time. Patients talk a lot about the stuff that is most visible to them. Diabetes is not as public as it used to be. There is no sound coming from the kidneys.
I am worried that we are going to be left with waves and waves of people with chronic disease that will affect the lives and livelihood of these people.
This is going to be a big challenge for us. There are 2 million people in the UK with long Covid according to the Office for National Statistics.
There isn't enough money to send everyone to a long Covid clinic. Good evidence on what works is needed for us to think about Scalable Approaches.
We can’t send everyone to a specialist long Covid clinic because there simply aren't the resources to do that
None of the treatments would work if you just lumped everyone together and put them in a trial. It needs to be more focused. We need targeted trials where we can look at multiple treatments at the same time.
It is going to be hard to get it off the ground quickly because there isn't the same political motivation. The governance structure we had before was very slow. It will be a challenge to deliver those trials at the speed that people want.
In South Africa, we don't have easy access to health services. We had a lot of inequalities in terms of health access and service delivery before the pandemic.
There aren't many health services that have been developed. It will be over-the-counter medicine or GP management for some people. Some people need medical specialists, rehabilitation specialists, mental health providers and sometimes oxygen. We don't have a plan for that. There are stories of people going from pillar to post and not being taken seriously. There is a huge gap between sympathetic clinicians in the areas and where we can.
The public health sector doesn't have enough capacity We have been overwhelmed with waves and they have impacted our health services. We haven't been able to deliver routine health services, and now a patient comes in, they need to have all these extensive investigations for very vague symptoms I don't think our public health system could handle it.
It doesn't matter to me what the impairment is, it's all part of the larger social category. There could be millions of new people joining this category of people.
About 25% of the adult population in the US is disabled. We already have systems that are inadequate and underfunded and people are struggling.
Many people with long Covid may not be able to identify as disabled. Those kinds of issues that people with long Covid are dealing with are from the disability community.
We have to value disability knowledge and disability expertise on what it is to live with a chronic illness, on how to navigate these systems, and how to advocate within them. Even in the face of huge structural barriers and cultural barriers, there is a lot of activism and expertise within these communities.
In some respects, what we are seeing is comforting. Almost all of the eligible population in Singapore isvaccinated. The majority of infections have occurred in people who have beenvaccinated. People who were notvaccinated when they had Covid have been the most complex cases of long Covid. I don't know what's going on I don't have any treatment or a test that can tell me what's going on.
I don’t have any treatment, I don’t have a diagnostic test which can really say what’s going on
It's a challenge. To be clear, I am lost. A lot of people who have been living with these symptoms for a long time have been looking on the internet, talking with different people, and coming up with ideas of what might work. I talk through those ideas and see which ones would make sense to explore.
There is a lot of research being put into this and I think it will be good for chronic fatigue syndrome. There are many similarities with long Covid. I don't know if it will be simple or straightforward, and how many people will benefit from it.
We didn't know that it would take so long to recover. The acute phase of the disease was not over when we began to see people complaining.
Post-covid patients were the first to receive this care. We don't think this will be over in the near future. The severity of the disease in the acute phase is expected to go milder with the vaccine. Even for the mild cases, we are still seeing patients with post-Omicron brain fog. It isn't predictable.
Cancer, heart failure and diabetes are some of the chronic conditions that have been compromised by the swine flu. When we were overwhelmed by the number of patients complaining of long Covid or post- Covid symptoms, we had to double our booking. Long Covid is a big problem for society and the healthcare system.
If you are experiencing some of the most common symptoms, you should seek medical attention. Don't let others suffer with you.
We need to know that Covid isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's the same thing as looking for a cure for cancer. We don't have a single cure for cancer, we have many targeted treatments, and they have been derived from the body's response to stress.
We need to understand the different endotypes of long Covid in order to give a targeted intervention. We will only get there with more detailed testing that is not standard in the current health system. None of the testing we are doing is standard, even though we are seeing clear differences in patient populations. The box needs to be looked outside.
There are different people who have the same constellation of symptoms. Not everybody has long Covid, not everybody has viral persistence, and not everybody has Dysautonomia. Understanding who belongs in which bucket will allow us to perform precision medicine treatments.
Patients with long Covid are getting a lot of help. It has not been as fast as it could have been, but now there is a multidisciplinary response.
I want to have a better understanding of what is triggering the symptoms of fit healthy people who have had a relatively mild disease. We don't know how to treat it until we understand what triggered it. Understanding the different types of patients is important because what works for one person doesn't work for another.
We collect good, robust data on how Covid affects people and its trajectory over time. It is difficult to plan for health services, therapeutic interventions, or other supports if we don't have a good idea of what we are dealing with.
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