Long COVID Treatment No Silver Bullets, Only a Few Bronze BBs

Long COVID is the consequence of having had COVID. Long COVID has many other names including Long-haul COVID, Post-COVID conditions (PCC), Post-COVID-19 syndrome, Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 condition (PASC) and Chronic COVID. Long COVID is the name most frequently used. COVID is not alone in having severe post infection consequences. Influenza, Ebola, Marburg, Dengue, and Lyme Disease are other infections with severe post infection consequences. Long COVID has emerged over the past few years and is ill-defined. Long COVID’s underlying science and treatments are rapidly evolving. There is no diagnostic test for it. The most-often reported lower bound on its prevalence is about 7%. Seven percent doesn’t sound like much, but under the assumption that 75% of the people in the world have had COVID, that means 420 million people in the world have Long COVID which is about 5 times the number of people killed or injured in the 20th and 21st century wars. There are several root causes for Long COVID with inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction being the two leading villains. Long COVID prevalence goes down with recent variants, COVID vaccination, early antiviral use, being fit, being young, and surprisingly being male. The most important action to reduce the chance of Long COVID is COVID vaccination. The impact of COVID vaccination on Long COVID prevalence is quite uncertain. Papers report 10% to 100% reduction in Long COVID rates from pre-disease vaccination. The average reported reduction is 50%. The impact of vaccination on people with no comorbidities is uncertain with wide ranges being reported. There are no guaranteed treatments for Long COVID; however, some treatments offer either broad or organ-specific relief for many. This paper reviews 179 different Long COVID treatments described in 249 papers. These papers came from the author’s personal data base called The Mouse That Roared of 24,000+ papers that have been accumulated over the last five and a half years. The Mouse That Roared papers cover all aspects COVID including the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the COVID disease, therapeutics, vaccines, behavior, testing, herd immunity, Long COVID, Long COVID Treatment, Politics and National COVID responses, etc. Unlike COVID, there are no excellent treatments, which I call silver bullets, for Long COVID Fortunately, there are some treatments that help some a bit. I will call those “bronze bb’s.” Even with them, healing is very slow. The recovery time with Long COVID is longer than the body’s normal times because COVID’s damage is widespread and because COVID damages our body’s healing process.