NATURE News Article: Long-COVID treatments: why the world is still waiting, 2022, Ledford

[Mij]

After a slow start, researchers are beginning to test ways to combat the lasting symptoms of the disease.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02140-w

 

[Trish]

That seems a pretty good article on the current state on treatment trials around the world for Long Covid.

A short excerpt:

Complex condition
A key barrier to developing long-COVID treatments has been uncertainty about the condition’s root cause. Over the past two years, a number of hypotheses have emerged as frontrunners, and researchers hope that insight into which ones are correct could help them to develop therapies. Evidence is mounting that lingering SARS-CoV-2 — or fragments of it — continues to cause trouble by stimulating the immune system. There are also signs that the infection generates antibodies that mistakenly attack the body’s own proteins, causing damage long after the initial illness. Researchers have found hints that COVID-19 could cause microscopic blood clots that block oxygen flow to tissues. It is also possible that a SARS-CoV-2 infection can wreak long-term havoc on gut microorganisms.

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive: many researchers think that long COVID can have multiple causes. Each idea suggests a route to relief. Antiviral drugs might vanquish persistent reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2. Drugs that suppress the immune system could quench a misguided immune response. Powerful anti-coagulants could dissolve micro-clots.

Although evidence is gradually accumulating in support of each of these possibilities, their links to long COVID are still tenuous enough to give some investigators pause before launching clinical trials. “The hypotheses are getting a bit stronger,” says Altmann. “But they’re not cast iron.”

Good to see also argument against GET.

 

[rvallee]

A key barrier to developing long-COVID treatments has been uncertainty about the condition’s root cause.

A lesson clearly not learned from the AIDS crisis. Like all the others. Imagine if AIDS research had been blocked on the basis that they didn't know the answer that only research can give. I mean it's pretty easy to imagine, it's literally what happened until a massive political movement funded by millions and many other factors forced the issue. And the basis for HIV denial, those first few years of jerking around doing nothing only serve to feed liars and the lies they tell.

I'm really tired with the defeatist attitude I see all over the place. So much whining about how they don't have all the answers that years of hard work would yield and that means there's no point even starting. Talk about being neurotic, gloomy, catastrophizing, etc. So much projection.

The lottery-based model of just waiting for someone to come up with the first clue is awful, seems to have given unrealistic expectations that hard work is not needed to get at it, that trying isn't worth the trouble. This era is long gone, all the easy clues have been found, the rest needs hard, sustained work.