Vaccines are no match for long Covid. Treating it is science's next great challenge | Danny Altmann

Failure to recognise the need for a response could be a blunder we rue for decades to come

Whatever your standpoint on whether the pandemic is over, or what living with the virus" should mean, it is clear some manifestation of Covid-19 will be with us for some time to come. Not least for the estimated 1.7 million people in the UK living with long Covid.

And lest any who made a full and rapid recovery from infection still wonder whether long Covid might be a self-reported creation of the indolent, this is a now a large, well-documented, convergent cluster of clear physiological symptoms, and it is common to every part of the globe affected by Covid-19. Many sufferers of my acquaintance were keen cyclists, runners, skiers and dancers, but are now disabled and deprived of their former passions, while some are unable to resume their former professions. Doctors and scientists the world over now consider this a recognised part of the Sars-CoV-2 symptom profile.

Danny Altmann is a professor of immunology at Imperial College London. He has contributed advice to the Cabinet Office, the all-party parliamentary group on long Covid and the EU