The four most urgent questions about long COVID
▻https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01511-z
It seems unlikely that the virus itself is still at work, says Evans. “Most of the studies have shown that after a few weeks you’ve pretty much cleared it, so I very much doubt it’s an infective consequence.”
However, there is evidence that fragments of the virus, such as protein molecules, can persist for months7, in which case they might disrupt the body in some way even if they cannot infect cells.
A further possibility is that long COVID is caused by the immune system going haywire and attacking the rest of the body. In other words, long COVID could be an autoimmune disease. “#SARS-CoV-2 is like a nuclear bomb in terms of the immune system,” says Steven Deeks, a physician and infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “It just blows everything up.” Some of those changes might linger — as has been seen in the aftermath of other viral infections (see ‘What is the relationship between long COVID and other #post-infection syndromes?’).
Still, it is too early to say which hypothesis is correct, and it might be that each is true in different people: preliminary data suggest that #long_COVID could be several disorders lumped into one