[Translated from French]

After three years of the pandemic, the veil is beginning to be lifted on the “mystery” of long COVID, a syndrome causing chronic and sometimes incapacitating symptoms following an infection with SARS-CoV-2. Explanations and personal accounts.

According to Dr David Putrino, long COVID is no longer just a theory. “There are so many good studies published in various scientific journals that clearly show the physiological differences between people who are infected and those who are not. We know that this is a physiological disease,” says this neuroscientist and physiotherapist from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

SARS-CoV-2 is an “insidious” virus, adds this expert who has been treating long COVID for three years. “A pandemic in the shadows.”

Worldwide, it is estimated that between 10% and 20% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have persistent symptoms. As a result, at least 65 million people worldwide are thought to be suffering from this syndrome, characterised by the presence of symptoms beyond 12 weeks after a COVID-19 infection.

“Even if we wanted to ignore long COVID, we can’t because it affects too many people. We can’t silence these millions of people; they all want answers.”

From one hypothesis to another

While researchers have not yet established with certainty the underlying biological mechanisms, there are a few hypotheses, which were described in a recent study in the journal Nature by researchers from the Scripps Research Institute in California, USA.

“The disease may seem very different to different people, but they all have one thing in common: the reduction in quality of life after a COVID-19 infection,” explains Julia Moore Vogel, a clinical trials specialist and co-author of this meta-analysis, which surveyed more than 200 studies. She herself has been suffering from brain fog and extreme fatigue as a result of long COVID since July 2020.