What is the course of long Covid?

Some studies from Italy suggest that maybe about 5 to 10 percent of people can have ongoing symptoms after three months, so there's a large number of people in the community who have these problems. They're not necessarily related to the severity of the initial Covid either and people who've had mild Covid can have ongoing long Covid symptoms as well, so there's no correlation between long COVID and the severity of the initial symptoms and also we know that it can be intermittent as well. People on the whole do improve but it can take some time and they can remain symptomatic for between three and six months. The government currently are trying to set up about 40 hot clinics that deal with long COVID in the UK and have put forward about £10 million pounds in funding. The idea being to see why people suffer with long COVID and persistent symptoms and one school of thought it may be related to ongoing abnormality in the immune function which is caused by the COVID and this needs more research to see the exact mechanisms and therefore decide on what type of treatment can be offered to these people. In other patients you get direct organ damage like strokes, kidney involvement, gut involvement and scarring in the lungs and again it's not quite clear how to deal with these problems either but hopefully as more data is collected and more research is being done we can see how to deal with this ongoing problem that COVID has left for a lot of people.