When COVID Never Goes Away
Dr Brian Block noticed that some of the people coming to his clinic at the University of California in San Francisco – created to help people recover from severe COVID – weren’t who he’d anticipated. Alongside those who had been hospitalised with COVID, which was the population he and his colleagues had expected to care for, about a quarter of the patients were people who had never been hospitalised for the disease. They’d had “mild” COVID, but months after thinking they’d beaten it, they didn’t feel like themselves – heart palpitations, brain fog, an inability to exercise like they used to.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the US, Dr Monica Lypson was seeing the same thing at a post-COVID clinic she’d cofounded at George Washington University. “The predominant patients who show up to our clinic are people in the prime of their lives; they might have
