The interesting thing is that they cannot really pin down if one has Long Covid as it doesnt show up the same in each person, so they have a wide range of criteria to check to see if one has it..
'Each patient is different. Not everyone with Long COVID has had a severe case of COVID. Some acquired the condition after a mild case, and others may have developed symptoms but never tested positive for COVID. “We usually call those patients ‘presumed COVID,’”
Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, a Yale School of Medicine immunobiologist, is director of the Yale Center of Infection & Immunity and leads multiple studies investigating the pathobiology of Long COVID. Iwasaki says research has shown that Long COVID is not a single disease.
She also lists
four hypotheses on her laboratory website that could explain Long COVID's initiation and progression:
- After a person has COVID, a persistent virus or remnants of it cause chronic inflammation and ongoing symptoms.
- The body’s disease-fighting B and T cells trigger an immune response—and subsequent inflammation—in a process called autoimmunity. The stimulus that triggers this occurs continuously in the body, making it difficult to pinpoint and shut down.
- Latent (or dormant) viruses inside an individual reactivate. (Every person carries multiple viruses that are dormant. Under certain circumstances, they can be reactivated.)
- Chronic changes occur in the body after the acute inflammatory response (COVID infection). Inflammation in one tissue can damage other tissues.
Yale’s Long COVID program aims to treat patients with lingering COVID-19 symptoms, such as fatigue, brain fog, and shortness of breath.
www.yalemedicine.org
