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CLEVELAND, Ohio — Roughly a third of adults who get COVID-19 report having had what is considered long COVID. And months after the initial infection, a staggering number of those who haven’t recovered - up to 80% - have some trouble carrying out their daily activities.
A Brookings from August said a conservative estimate was that 16 million people were suffering from long COVID-19 at that time. The it may be as high as 19 million adults.
But whether 16 million or 19 million, one thing is clear: there’s a lot of them. Here in Cleveland and across the country, scientists and doctors are trying to figure out what’s wrong and how to help them.
The symptoms that fall under the long COVID umbrella include everything from a persistent loss of taste and smell to fatigue so disabling that the affected person is unable to return to work or daily life. In between, there are reports of brain fog, headaches, chronic gastrointestinal issues, increased incidence of diabetes, blood clots, heart arrhythmias and intolerance to exercise.
To the untrained eye, the list of symptoms is dizzying and appears specific to each individual patient.
However, behind the scenes, and thus far largely out of media fanfare, researchers and clinicians have doggedly made strides in not only classifying and defining what long COVID is, but also in identifying the underlying mechanism of the disorder and how they might treat it.
One of the largest centers of research is right here in our own back yard at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and MetroHealth System.
The economic impact from the sheer volume of American workers who could be permanently disabled is troubling. In fact, it was of such concern that in December 2020 Congress gave more than $1 billion to the National Institutes of Health to fund research on the prevention and treatment of long COVID.
University Hospitals and MetroHeath System jointly was the recipient of one of the 15 grants the NIH subsequently awarded to research institutions around the country in early 2021, and currently counts itself as the largest in terms of the number of research subjects.
To date, they have enrolled over 800 patients, and they hope to add 300 to 400 more, said , an infectious disease specialist who heads up the project at UH.
The goal, said McComsey, is to uncover so-called biomarkers of COVID disease – any sort of measurable biological change – that could identify, and ultimately separate out patients who had an acute COVID infection and continued to experience COVID symptoms months after they no longer tested positive.
McComsey said that over the last year they and the other researchers around the country have collected samples of blood, saliva, urine or stool, and cataloged the progression of symptoms from patients with and without COVID.