This text is taken from our newsletter “Le Courrier du coronavirus” of May 16, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
What if the key to “long COVID” was found in virus fragments hidden all over the human body? These coronavirus “ghosts” are present everywhere in some infected people and help prolong the symptoms of the disease, suggests a literature review published in Nature.
Whether in the gut, eyes, heart, brain, chest or appendix, the COVID-19 virus can hide in every corner of the human body for a long time.
Researchers from Singapore, New York, California and Austria have all spotted virus fragments in different organs of patients with persistent symptoms.
For example, a team of gastroenterologists from the lab at Stanford University in California found that 32 of 46 participants in their study who had suffered from mild COVID-19 had evidence of viral molecules in their body. their gut seven months after an acute infection. About two-thirds of those 32 people had long-lasting symptoms of COVID-19.
Scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine in New York, for their part, have established that, “Six months after the initial infection, the cells still respond to the molecules produced by SARS-CoV-2”.
“All of these studies support the possibility that long-term viral reservoirs contribute to long-term COVID,” the article concludes. Nature.
Some of the studies cited are only anecdotal or have not yet been peer reviewed. No obvious link has yet been established between these virus fragments and the symptoms of long-lasting COVID-19, but they are certainly promising avenues for scientists who are trying to understand – and treat – this disease that affects hundreds of thousands of people around the world.