WHEN COVID NEVER GOES AWAY

LATE LAST SPRING, Dr Brian Block noticed that some of the people coming into his clinic at the University of California, San Francisco – the one he and his colleagues created to help people recover from severe COVID – weren’t who he’d anticipated. Alongside those who had been hospitalised with COVID, which was the population he and his colleagues had expected to care for, about a quarter of the patients were people who had never been hospitalised for the disease. They’d had “mild” acute COVID – a fever, a cough that they’d recovered from quickly. But months after thinking they’d beaten the illness, they didn’t feel like themselves – heart palpitations, brain fog, an inability to exercise even close to how they used to.

Meanwhile, on the other