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While watching the scientific community grapple with long COVID, I have thought a lot about a scene in The Lord of the Rings. Faced with impending doom, the hobbits Merry and Pippin ask the powerful treelike ents for help. But despite the urgency of the situation, the ents are slow. They meet for hours, and after a lot of deliberation, they announce that they’ve agreed that the hobbits are not orcs. The hobbits, who already knew that, are shocked. They were hoping for more.In June 2020, when I started reporting on long COVID, few scientists or physicians knew that it...

LUBBOCK, Texas — For some COVID-19 patients, getting over their infection is just the beginning of the recovery. Over the last year, COVID “long haulers” have continued experiencing a variety of symptoms months after the virus clears. These include anything from skin problems, to shortness of breath, to losing the sense of taste or smell. Now, researchers say they may know why this is happening. A new study finds coronavirus actually causes long-term changes to an infected patient’s genes.Specifically, scientists reveal the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, creates long-lasting changes to human gene expression. These tiny spikes...

A few months after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, health experts started to notice that while the majority of those infected with the virus made a full recovery, there were also a lot of people who were still suffering from mysterious symptoms months after their initial infection. This group of people has come to be known by the term "long haulers," and researchers are still struggling to understand why they can't recover—especially since some of them experienced little to know symptoms during their initial infection. If you are currently suffering from unusual symptoms, it could mean that you...