LIINC in the News
Science Podcast
April 11, 2024 —
Trialing treatments for Long Covid, and a new organelle appears on the scene
First up on the show this week, clinical trials of new and old treatments for Long Covid. Producer Meagan Cantwell is joined by Staff Writer Jennifer Couzin-Frankel and some of her sources to discuss the difficulties of studying and treating this debilitating disease.
Science
April 11, 2024 —
Lessons in Persistence: New Long COVID trials aim to clear lingering virus — and help patients in desperate need
Long Covid has been a vexing foe, but these clinical trials mark a new chapter. They’re the first targeting the syndrome’s underlying biology, and many of them, focus on a key question: Is lingering SARS-CoV-2 virus behind patients’ symptoms? A number of studies have indicated some people with Long Covid do not fully clear SARS-CoV-2 from their body. Viral “reservoirs” show up in the gut, blood, and elsewhere. Now, scientists want to know whether wiping out that virus brings relief.
The trials are small in number, and most are modest in size. The monoclonal antibody study includes just 30 patients, two-thirds of whom will get treatment and one-third a placebo. But each enrollee holds clues about Long Covid that doctors hope to mine. Even if an approach fails, the knowledge gained could push science forward. “It’s not going to happen overnight,” says Steven Deeks, a UCSF infectious disease doctor who began studying Long Covid in the spring of 2020 and helped design the antibody trial. “But it’s happening.”
UCSF
February 22, 2024 —
First Tissue Bank May Help Solve Mystery of Long COVID Misery
UC San Francisco will launch the world’s first tissue bank with samples donated by patients with long COVID. The move follows research indicating that the virus can continue to linger throughout the body and may hold the key to understanding the cause of the debilitating disorder and lead to effective treatments.
By October 2023, an estimated 14% of Americans had or had had long COVID, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disorder may appear as a continuation of the original COVID symptoms or manifest as new symptoms affecting any part of the body. In serious cases multiple body systems are affected, including the brain, heart, lungs, kidneys and skin.
Recent studies have shown that in patients with long COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus may not fully clear after the initial infection. Instead, the virus remains in what scientists have termed “viral reservoirs,” identified in patient tissue months or even years later. These reservoirs are now believed to be a primary driver of long COVID, provoking the immune system to respond by prompting conditions like blood clotting disorders and inflammation and cognition dysfunction.
San Francisco Chronicle
February 22, 2024 —
UCSF launches novel approach to help unravel mysteries of long COVID
Hoping to speed up understanding of long COVID — and hasten a cure for millions of sufferers — UCSF researchers on Thursday announced the opening of the world’s first bank of tissue specimens from people who have the mysterious disorder.
The decision to collect such samples and make them available for researchers everywhere to study rests on growing evidence that bits of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, can remain active in human tissue for months or years after the body should have cleared it. For example, UCSF researchers recently found the virus in a patient’s colon tissue 676 days after the person was infected with the coronavirus.
San Francisco Business Times
February 22, 2024 —
'Long Covid' tissue bank at UCSF aims to turn $3M into new research
The virus behind Covid-19 is playing a long game of hide-and-seek. Now scientists studying Long Covid at UCSF are getting $3 million to develop a tissue bank to seed a greater understanding of the virus' devastating lingering effects.
The $3 million grant to support the long Covid tissue bank at the University of California, San Francisco, is part of a broader rollout of global efforts backed Thursday by $15 million from the LongCovid Research Consortium of the nonprofit PolyBio Research Foundation. Many of those projects are tapping learnings and platforms developed in the fight against the AIDS virus.
KQED
February 22, 2024 —
UCSF Researchers Launch Tissue Bank to Study Long COVID
Dr. Michael Peluso and KQED health correspondent Lesley McClurg discusses the launch of a new UCSF-based tissue bank to learn more about Long COVID. The bank will serve to collect and analyze tissues from various parts of the body for evidence of persistent COVID-19 virus in the body which could be driving Long COVID symptoms.
The Long COVID Sessions
January 24, 2024 —
Episode 69: Prof. Tim Henrich - Viral Persistence and T Cell Dysregulation
With a background in HIV and as part of the Division of Experimental Medicine, Professor Tim Henrich approaches Long Covid with extensive post-viral knowledge, an innovative mindset, and high end technology which have enabled him and his team to see the physiological changes caused by SARS-CoV2 and the impact of treatments.
Henrich and the team are using a combination of longitudinal studies, peripheral blood samples, biopsies and high-resolution PET / CT imaging to look deep into the tissues of Long Covid patients, and the revelations have been startling.
They have found evidence of viral persistence and even double-stranded RNA in tissues years after initial infection. And they are currently embarking into clinical trials to address viral reservoirs, using Monoclonal antibody treatments, as well as protease inhibitor anti-viral Ensitrelvir to try and address what they believe to be the root-cause of the chronic systemic disease. And they are looking at the suggestion that current doses of antivirals are insufficient to clear the virus.
Whilst still grappling to establish the risk factors that make us susceptible to Long Covid, and not ruling out other factors such as reactivation of human herpes viruses which are being studied at length by other teams, Henrich does feel that he is beginning to get a handle on the pathophysiology of the disease which could lead to establishing a biomarker, and metrics by which we can truly assess treatment efficacy, hopefully leading us on the road to appropriate treatment.
UCSF Grand Rounds
December 15, 2023 —
Update on Long Covid
In this Covid Medical Grand Rounds, we’ll update the science and epidemiology of Long Covid, with three of the nation’s leading experts on the topic. We’ll cover new findings about the mechanisms by which Long Covid causes symptoms, progress in trying to identify effective treatments, and our growing understanding regarding the impact of Covid infections on long-term health outcomes.
Speakers:
Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, is chief of the Research and Development Service and director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the VA Saint Louis Health Care System, as well as a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University. He serves on the White House Intra-agency Policy Committee on Long Covid, co-chaired the Biden-Harris Administration committee that developed the U.S. Government National Research Action Plan on Long Covid and serves on the Federal Government Long Covid Coordination Council. He has had numerous publications in Nature regarding the long-term impacts of Covid.
Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, is a professor of immunobiology at the Yale University School of Medicine. A leading scientific voice during the Covid-19 pandemic, she is also known for her advocacy on women and underrepresented minorities in science and medicine. Akiko is the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity and is at the forefront of several Long Covid investigations including the Mount-Sinai Yale Long Covid study, Yale LISTEN study, and Yale Paxlovid trial. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Michael Peluso, MD, is an infectious disease physician at ZSFG. When the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic emerged, he led the efforts to implement the Long-term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus (LIINC) study examining Covid’s long-term effects on health. LIINC became one of the first studies focused on understanding the biological mechanisms that drive Long Covid and has supported over 50 scientific collaborations. Through LIINC, Michael now leads a Long Covid clinical trials program. He also oversees the implementation of the NIH’s RECOVER initiative at UCSF.
00:04:49-00:14:13 – Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, chief of the Research and Development Service and director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the VA Saint Louis Health Care System, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University
00:14:25-00:28:20 – Michael Peluso, MD, infectious disease physician at ZSFG
00:28:30-00:45:08 – Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, professor of immunobiology at the Yale University School of Medicine
00:45:18-1:03:02 – Q&A
Audacity
October 23, 2023 —
$1 Billion Investment in Long COVID Research Would be Used in Three Key Areas
The American public is attempting to move on from the COVID-19 pandemic, and research into long COVID may be dwindling. One UCSF professor is hoping for a moonshot of $1 billion dollars annually from the U.S. government to invest in long COVID research.
For more on this, KCBS Radio news anchor Eric Thomas spoke with Dr. Michael Peluso, assistant professor of medicine at UCSF, in today's Ask An Expert segment.
The Long COVID Sessions
October 9, 2023 —
Episode 64: Michael Peluso, M.D. – Viral Reservoirs & MAB Trial
Michael Peluso M.D., an infectious disease clinical-translational physician-scientist at UCSF, has been studying Long Covid patients since the start of the pandemic. Along with Steven Deeks and Tim Henrich, they enrolled their first patient into the LIINC study on 21st April 2020 and have not stopped working to make progress understanding the pathogenesis of, and potential treatment for, the disease.
Peluso and the team have recently used multimodal molecular imaging on a small sample of Long Covid patients which has confirmed their belief that there is a reservoir of viral RNA in the tissues. The paper is currently in pre-print awaiting peer review.
With the knowledge gained from tracking patients for three and a half years and the confirmation of viral reservoirs, Peluso has now launched one of the first and most exciting clinical trials for Long Covid, outSMART-LC. The trial will assess whether monoclonal antibody treatment (MAB) can be effective in clearing the viral reservoir from the tissues.
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2023 —
UCSF is trying a new tactic to eradicate long COVID symptoms. Here’s how it works.
The outSMART-LC clinical trial is one of only a small number testing a treatment or cure for the post-COVID condition, which is bafflingly complex, often robbing people of the ability to think clearly, wake up refreshed from sleep, exercise, or even breathe deeply.
It rests on evidence that pieces of the coronavirus that causes COVID can linger in the body for years after infection. UCSF scientists want to see if annihilating those bits can improve or even erase the debilitating symptoms. “This is just hypothetical, but that is why we’re doing the study,” said Dr. Michael Peluso, principal investigator of the trial dubbed outSMART-LC. “We’re going to take the virus out of commission — we think — and see if people feel better.”
The drug that he and co-investigator Dr. Steven Deeks are aiming at the unwanted viral visitors is a monoclonal antibody, a lab-made protein that attacks viruses more effectively than natural antibodies. Called AER002, it’s manufactured by Aerium Therapeutics, a Boston biotech company.
UCSF Magazine
June 26, 2023 —
Ask the Expert: What’s New in the Search for a Long COVID Cure?
UCSF infectious disease specialist Michael Peluso, MD, who co-leads one of the world’s oldest studies of long COVID, discusses the condition’s mysteries. “There is no smoking gun,” he says. “If that were the case, we would have figured this out two years ago.”
What exactly is long COVID?
“It refers to unexplained symptoms that are new or worse since someone had acute COVID and that are not attributable to other causes. They persist for at least three months after COVID’s onset and impact a person’s quality of life. Between 15 million and 30 million Americans may have it.
But there is not just one long COVID syndrome. Some people have profound neurocognitive symptoms, including difficulty concentrating. Others have cardiopulmonary symptoms that reduce their capacity to exercise. Others have disorders in their autonomic nervous system, with unexplained swings in their heart rate or blood pressure. And these categories are not monolithic. People can have symptoms across the categories.
I don’t think anybody believes a single pathological mechanism causes all cases of long COVID. It’s likely that different types of long COVID have different drivers.”
The New York Times
January 21, 2021 —
My ‘Long Covid’ Nightmare: Still Sick After 6 Months
Since March, research studies and treatment centers had been popping up across the country to help unravel Covid’s long-term mystery.
One of those is at the University of California, San Francisco. There, Michael Peluso, an infectious-diseases doctor and co-principal investigator of a study of Covid’s long-term impact, and his team have been interviewing about 250 Covid-19 survivors since April. In early interviews with subjects, Peluso told me recently, he would tick off a list of possible symptoms from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He quickly found out that some people’s symptoms diverged from the C.D.C.’s initial list. Patients described phantom smells, like burning cigarettes or burned meat, he said. Others complained about low blood pressure that resulted in fainting. “I never knew what people were going to say,” he said. “People would periodically have heart palpitations or shortness of breath out of nowhere.” Peluso said he and his team were the first point of contact many participants had with a doctor since they got sick. “It highlighted the challenge of access to good health care in America,” he said.
He said it was too early to draw conclusions about how to prevent or treat long Covid. Some researchers are exploring the vascular system, including abnormal blood clotting. “If scientists can understand the biological process, we can hopefully devise a way to treat it,” he said. Some study participants, he said, began to feel better only eight months after the first diagnosis. “The hard part is there is not a standard answer for everybody,” Peluso said, adding that “it will take a while for us to understand what we have collectively been through.”
San Francisco Chronicle
February 22, 2021 —
Terrifying 'post-COVID syndrome' is next focus for researchers in Bay Area and beyond
The end of the pandemic feels tantalizingly near as vaccines arrive and the pace of new infections slows. But a new coronavirus mystery is set to keep researchers busy in the Bay Area and across the country for years to come. Doctors call the medical conundrum “post-acute COVID syndrome.” Scientists prefer “post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection.” But those suffering from the multitude of frightening symptoms that don’t go away just call themselves “long-haulers.”
“Thousands of researchers across the United States are going to be developing projects to study this problem,” said Dr. Michael Peluso, an infectious disease expert who manages a UCSF study of long-haulers with funding for 250 participants. “There will be a huge effort to do this now, and it will far exceed the small studies that have existed so far.”
At UCSF, 20 of the first 100 people in the study of long-haulers reported persistent brain fog — including forgetfulness, trouble thinking of words, and disorganized thinking that led to missed deadlines. Of the 20, 14 had never been to the hospital for their COVID, so the changes couldn’t be blamed on side effects often associated with immobility or drugs administered during a long stay for treatment.
Dr. Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist, took a closer look at the 14, whose median age was 39. Cognitive symptoms in patients recovering from COVID-19 may “last months or longer after acute illness,” Hellmuth and her colleagues reported in a study published Feb. 2 on the online site SpringerLink. They also found that traditional tests for detecting dementia in elderly people showed nothing wrong with this group.
Instead, the problem looked similar to the kind of brain fog associated with HIV, which is linked to inflammation and an overactive immune system. But questions remain. “Is this a direct impact of the virus? Or an indirect impact of the inflammation? What if the immune system is instead making antibodies against the brain — a postinfectious autoimmune process?” The neurologist has submitted a grant proposal to find the answers.
The New York Times
January 12, 2021 —
6 Months After Leaving the Hospital, Covid Survivors Still Face Lingering Health Issues
For millions of coronavirus survivors, it’s an increasingly important question: How common, how serious and how long-lasting are the physical and mental aftereffects of Covid-19?
A new study — believed to be the largest so far in which doctors evaluated patients six months after they became ill — suggests that many people will experience lingering problems like fatigue, insomnia, depression, anxiety or diminished lung function.
The study of 1,733 coronavirus patients who were discharged from a hospital in Wuhan, China, the original epicenter of the pandemic, found that more than three-quarters of them had at least one symptom six months later.
“This is one of the first publications that really describes in some level of detail longer-term outcomes among quite a large group of people,” said Dr. Michael Peluso, an infectious disease physician at the University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “It documents what people providing clinical care to Covid patients have known for a while now — that a large proportion of people do have long-term health consequences.”
FiveThirtyEight
November 13, 2020 —
'What We Know About ‘Long COVID’
On this week’s episode of PODCAST-19, we do a deep dive into “long COVID,” which is when people who’ve survived COVID-19 continue to experience a variety of symptoms for weeks, or sometimes months, after their acute illness. What’s causing this disease to linger for so many people? And what will happen to our health care system if a lot of people are sick for years to come with a hard-to-define illness?
A ‘long Covid’ patient receiving physical therapy as part of her recovery.
The Wall Street Journal
September 28, 2020 —
Four Different Family Members. Four Different Covid-19 Outcomes.
The Ruspini family in Sunnyvale, Calif., went down like dominoes. One by one, they all got the coronavirus in early April, but with different symptoms and recovery trajectories…
One of the biggest mysteries of the virus that causes Covid-19 is why it leads to such different experiences for the people it strikes. While some severe outcomes can be explained by people more at risk of serious illness—such as the elderly and those with chronic conditions—other outcomes have left doctors and researchers stumped, particularly the subset of Covid-19 patients with persistent symptoms, who often refer to themselves as long-haulers or long-Covid patients.
“The thing that has really stood out to me the most about this viral infection is that it’s really remarkable how much variability there is on the recovery end,” says Michael Peluso, a clinical fellow in the division of HIV, infectious diseases, and global medicine at UCSF, and a member of a team working on the LIINC (Long-term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus) study.
TIME
August 18, 2020 —
Some Coronavirus Patients Are Reporting Symptoms That Last Months. Nobody Knows Exactly How to Treat Them
Kayla Brim laughed when she learned it could take 10 days to get her COVID-19 test results back. “I thought, ‘Okay, well, within 10 days I should be fine,’” she remembers. That was on July 2. More than a month later, Brim is still far from fine…
[With] COVID-19, it’s not just the sickest who face a long road back. A July 24 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that, out of about 300 non-hospitalized but symptomatic COVID-19 patients, 35% were still experiencing symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath and fatigue up to three weeks after diagnosis. (By contrast, more than 90% of non-hospitalized influenza patients fully recover within two weeks.) Recovery from COVID-19 can be a drawn-out process for patients of all ages, genders and prior levels of health, “potentially leading to prolonged absence from work, studies, or other activities,” the report noted.
The CDC’s surveyors only checked up on people a few weeks after they tested positive for coronavirus, but emerging evidence suggests a large subset of patients are sick for months, not just weeks, on end. Dr. Michael Peluso, who is studying long-term COVID-19 outcomes at the University of California, San Francisco, says about 20% of his research participants are still sick between one and four months after diagnosis.
Science
July 31, 2020 —
From ‘brain fog’ to heart damage, COVID-19’s lingering problems alarm scientists
One of the few systematic, long-term studies of COVID-19 patients with mild acute symptoms is underway in San Francisco, where researchers are recruiting 300 adults from local doctors and hospitals, for 2 years of follow-up. “We don’t have a broad idea of what’s happening” after the initial illness, says Steven Deeks, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who is leading the study, modeled on HIV cohorts he has followed for decades. What does “ongoing symptoms” even mean, Deeks asks. “Is that weeks, months? We don’t know that it’s years.”
More than 100 people ranging in age from 18 to 80 have signed up so far. Cardiologists, neurologists, pulmonologists, and others are assessing the volunteers, and blood, saliva, and other biological specimens are being banked and analyzed.
Although scientists hope they’ll learn how to avert chronic symptoms and help patients currently suffering, this latest chapter in the COVID-19 chronicle has been sobering. The message many researchers want to impart: Don’t underestimate the force of this virus. “Even if the story comes out a little scary, we need a bit of that right now,” Iwasaki says, because the world needs to know how high the stakes are. “Once the disease is established, it’s really hard to go backward.”
NPR
July 24, 2020 —
Think COVID-19 lasts 2 weeks? This patient has been suffering for months
What scientists understand least about COVID-19 are its long-term effects. Conventional wisdom says most cases are mild and the infection lasts about two weeks, but some people have been dealing with serious symptoms for a lot longer.
Cliff Morrison is a health care administrator in the Bay Area and has been experiencing symptoms for months. He’s participating in UCSF’s two-year study on the long-term effects of COVID-19.
KCRW: When did you first get sick, and when were you first diagnosed?
Cliff Morrison: “I started with what I thought was a really severe allergy attack, because I've had chronic allergies my whole life, around the last week in March. And the first week in April, I realized if this was allergies, it was the most serious that I've ever had. But I had never spiked a temp [temperature]. Then on April 8th, I came to work and I just felt terrible. I felt like I'd hit a wall and realized that I probably needed medical attention. So I called my doctor and he was able to see me that afternoon. And he immediately diagnosed me from just examining me and seeing the symptoms that I had.
UCSF Magazine
July 24, 2020 —
We Thought It Was Just a Respiratory Virus
In late January, when hospitals in the United States confirmed the presence of the novel coronavirus, health workers knew to watch for precisely three symptoms: fever, cough, and shortness of breath. But as the number of infections climbed, the symptom list began to grow. Some patients lost their sense of smell and taste. Some had nausea or diarrhea. Some had arrhythmias or even heart attacks. Some had damaged kidneys or livers. Some had headaches, blood clots, rashes, swelling, or strokes. Many had no symptoms at all.
By June, clinicians were swapping journal papers, news stories, and tweets describing more than three dozen ways that COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, appears to manifest itself. Now researchers at UC San Francisco and around the world have begun taking a closer look at this dizzying array of symptoms to get at the disease’s root causes. They are learning from people inside the hospital and out; people on the brink of death and only mildly sick; people newly exposed and recovered; people young and old, Black, brown, and white. And they are beginning to piece together the story of a virus unlike any known before.
ABC News Australia
July 16, 2020 —
The long road to recovery experienced by some COVID-19 sufferers
It is now clear that for some patients who get through the acute stage of COVID-19, the battle is still far from over. Most will make a full recovery, but for a significant group it is a long and difficult process, with on-going, unpredictable symptoms.
TRACY BOWDEN, REPORTER: 2020 was going to be a big year for Sydney singer-songwriter, Georgia Mooney.
GEORGIA MOONEY: At the end of February this year I moved over to the UK to make some music in the Northern Hemisphere. It was all very exciting and I had definitely been looking forward to it for a long time.
TRACY BOWDEN: Now she's back in Sydney recovering from COVID-19 which was diagnosed in late March soon after she returned from London.
GEORGIA MOONEY: If I knew then what I know now about the virus, I would be really scared…
TRACY BOWDEN: A trial at the University of California in San Francisco is studying the clinical consequences of COVID-19 infection.
DR MICHAEL PELUSO, INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST: A significant proportion, somewhere probably between 15 per cent and 30 per cent of people who are participating in the study, report at least some symptoms that are lingering, even 30, 60, 90 days after their initial illness…
Vox
July 14, 2020 —
What happens if Covid-19 symptoms don’t go away? Doctors are trying to figure it out.
In late March, when Covid-19 was first surging, Jake Suett, a doctor of anesthesiology and intensive care medicine with the National Health Service in Norfolk, England, had seen plenty of patients with the disease — and intubated a few of them. Then one day, he started to feel unwell, tired, with a sore throat. He pushed through it, continuing to work for five days until he developed a dry cough and fever. “Eventually, I got to the point where I was gasping for air literally doing nothing, lying on my bed”…
It’s now been 14 weeks since Suett’s presumed infection and he still has symptoms, including trouble concentrating, known as brain fog. (One recent study in Spain found that a majority of 841 hospitalized Covid-19 patients had neurological symptoms, including headaches and seizures.) “I don’t know what my future holds anymore,” Suett says…
Scientists are still learning about the many ways the virus that causes Covid-19 impacts the body — both during initial infection and as symptoms persist. One of the researchers studying them is Michael Peluso, a clinical fellow in infectious diseases at the University of California San Francisco, who is is currently enrolling Covid-19 patients in San Francisco in a two-year study to study the disease’s long-term effects…
UCSF Medicine Grand Rounds
June 18, 2020 —
Highlights
Panel discussion of COVID patients with persistent symptoms and the long-term manifestations of the disease:
0:30:27 — COVID patients with persistent symptoms share their experience.
0:44:55 — Dr. Michael Peluso (LIINC co-principal investigator) discusses the LIINC study and a clinical approach to COVID-19.
0:54:02 — Dr. Jeffrey Martin (LIINC co-principal investigator) presents on the epidemiology of the virus.
1:00:28 — Dr. Tim Henrich (LIINC co-principal investigator) discusses how his lab is studying COVID-19 on a molecular level.
1:11:17 — Discussion wrap-up.
You can also view this UCSF Medical Ground Rounds on YouTube.
The Mercury News
June 27, 2020 —
Living with COVID-19 when it won’t go away: New research of survivors confirms weird waves of persistent symptoms, linked to off-kilter immune system
Cliff Morrison conquered the COVID-19 virus more than two months ago. Then why does he still feel so lousy? While the majority of patients with mild or moderate symptoms recover promptly, new research confirms that others suffer from a lingering cluster of symptoms — possibly caused by a battle-weary immune system.
The UC San Francisco-led investigation, which is recruiting patients from around the Bay Area, will help the growing ranks of survivors who are now returning to work and yet worry about what the future holds…
Mission Local
June 18, 2020 —
UCSF Medical Grand Rounds talks treatments and lingering symptoms
Michael Peluso, a clinical fellow at UCSF who is working on the Long-Term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus (LIINC) study, outlined several key questions the UCSF study is hoping to answer, including the prevalence of biomedical and psychosocial conditions from COVID-19 and if reinfection is possible. The study includes COVID-19 patients from diverse backgrounds, who are asked to answer detailed medical questionnaires and allow a variety of biospecimens to be collected at regular visits in the weeks and months following their recovery. Peluso noted that the study has found “a small but significant proportion of people who have persistent or recurrent symptoms” similar to Morrison’s…
Frontline
June 11, 2020 —
Interviews with Leaders Responding to the COVID-19 Epidemic
Our work with the UCSF HIV SCOPE cohort and performing translational infectious diseases studies helped provide the experience and infrastructure needed to efficiently develop these COVID-19 cohorts as the epidemic was unfolding. When it became clear that COVID-19 would become a pandemic, we quickly pivoted our HIV study infrastructure to recruit COVID-19 positive individuals with the overall goal of understanding the determinants of COVID-19 severity and long-term sequelae of COVID-19… Beyond characterizing the immune response over time, LIINC is particularly interested in determining whether the potency or durability of that response will differ between subpopulations…
San Francisco Chronicle
May 31, 2020 —
Long after the illness is gone, the damage from coronavirus may remain
The roulette wheel of infection that determines which COVID-19 patients live and die has gripped the world in fear, but researchers are looking into another insidious danger — that the disease could be inflicting lasting, even permanent, damage on its victims.
Infectious disease specialists have learned that the health problems caused by the coronavirus sometimes linger for months, raising fears that the virus may have long-term consequences for people’s health. “There’s no doubt there has been anecdotal evidence of symptoms lingering for a while, but we don’t know if it’s 1%, 5%, 20% or 50%” of the cases, said Jeffrey Martin, a clinical epidemiologist and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF…
San Francisco Chronicle
May 30, 2020 —
The curious case of the SF doctor who’s been coronavirus-positive nearly 90 days and counting
Dr. Coleen Kivlahan knew what the result of her coronavirus test would be the moment she stepped outside her San Francisco home and sensed she was smelling a forest fire, a symptom that can accompany loss of smell.
Then that persistent cough kicked in. Those are two of the lasting symptoms. So it was no surprise that she tested positive on Wednesday. The surprise was that it had been at least 85 days that she has been infected with the coronavirus…
Dr. Michael Peluso examines a study participant.