More Than One?

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:07 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: Is long Covid more than one condition? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Long Covid refers to symptoms of Covid-19 infection that persist for long periods of time, and some people who report it say their symptoms resolved after they got vaccinated against the virus. Brian Garibaldi, a critical care medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, reviews what’s known so far.

Garibaldi: By most reports right now and these are anecdotal it’s forty or fifty percent of people who are maybe getting better, and since we know that by and large people are developing immune responses to the vaccine, in those people it’s probably not a persistent low level viral infection that’s causing the problem. So I think what we’re going to find out is that long Covid, or if you want to call it post acute sequelae of Covid or PASC which is what the NIH has called it, it’s a heterogeneous disease. For some people it’s going to be predominantly neurological, for other people it’s going to be cardiovascular, others it’s going to be pulmonary, we may end up finding that these different types of long Covid are actually caused by different things.  :33

For now Garibaldi says get the vaccine, since it is recommended. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.