How to Stay Informed About Long COVID News
Welcome to Long COVID Dispatches. In this blog, our goal is to keep you informed of the best and newest information on Long COVID. My name is Dr. Lisa Sanders, and I’m an internist on the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine and the medical director of Yale New Haven Health’s Multidisciplinary Long COVID Care Center.
I have the pleasure of working with a super-smart group of Yale MD/PhD students who will be writing many of the blog posts you’ll read here. They are fascinated by the science that continues to emerge from the study of this strange and often devastating post-infectious syndrome we call Long COVID. Our goal is to share with you the newest science, studies, treatments, and thinking about this illness, which is so often left in the wake of COVID-19. I edit this blog and will offer my insights at the end of each post.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was clear that COVID-19 was more than just an infectious disease that delivered all manner of suffering but then moved on, allowing those in its path to fully recover. Many people, once infected, remained ill long after any signs of the acute infection had resolved. It was for these individuals that this clinic was started.
The clinic’s true origins date back to the days when the first cases of Long COVID declared themselves. The Yale New Haven Health physicians who cared for patients with acute COVID-19 represented three subspecialties—pulmonology, cardiology, and neurology. They were the first to see that recovery for many patients was unexpectedly long and slow. Each medical group developed their own approach to helping these patients manage their symptoms. One year ago, I was brought in to help diagnose and treat the influx of patients now struggling with Long COVID symptoms.
Our patients and their wide range of symptoms are what drive us to learn as much as we can about the illnesses appearing after COVID-19. And seeing how quickly knowledge was accumulating about Long COVID, we were asked frequently by patients, “How can we stay up to date? How can we know what is new and may be useful?” So these patients were the stimulus for creating this blog.
We hope to post updates here every couple of weeks. If some dramatic news about Long COVID breaks, we’ll also try to get a jump on it here. If you learn of some exciting news about Long COVID, please feel free to share it with us, and we will look into it and try to help spread the word. Send it to us here: LongCovidDispatches@yale.edu.
We are also interested in your stories. Tell us how COVID-19 affected you. Share how you are dealing with your Long COVID. We will post stories (using pseudonyms) that provide new insights or manifestations of this many-faceted, multidimensional disorder. (Send your stories here: LongCovidDispatches@yale.edu.)
As it turns out, Long COVID has lessons for us all. Working together to share our experiences, our knowledge, and our discoveries is one way to manage this unexpected remnant of the COVID-19 pandemic.
