This evening on NPR News, I saw their story on Long COVID and pending work. You may view the segment here. From watching ME/CFS research for several decades, “I wept” for Long COVID patients — I do not expect any of this planned work to produce relief to patients.

The video below are my feeling about what Long COVID is, how to approach detection and treatment.

Key Points

• Like with another post-infection syndrome, Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), decades of research has failed to find a magical single key factor nor an effective new drug to treat.
  • Their core assumption is that there must a simple single factor
  • The reality is that there are dozens of factors with commonality across patients, they are also highly individual factors.
• Studies have constantly shown microbiome dysbiosis as a signature. A large number are shifted. What is reported in studies can be reviewed here.
• We can see this in contributed microbiome samples from people with Long COVID. You can see those shifts on this page.
• There are clinical issues with this approach — because of a lack of standardization of microbiome tests used in studies and clinics. See this post. There are issues which can be resolved with some effort.

Looking at bacteria from different labs, we find almost no agreement. If we use KEGG data on samples from different labs, we end up with agreement on which metabolites are abnormal across different labs.

We have demonstrated the ability to accurately predict Long COVID from microbiome samples as shown by a patient agreement with the predicted symptoms illustrated below:

We are able to generate suggestions of probiotics, supplements, etc that will reduce the symptoms with a high success rate.

Some Case Studies are here. An example of an individual protocol is Treatment Suggestions for Long COVID.

IMHO: Researchers are looking for answers in their expertise. The answers are there, there are just few people with the appropriate expertise.