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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

There's no such thing as "long COVID" specifically. Any serious viral infection has the potential to cause sequalae in susceptible patients for reasons that are still not well understood. Some of those are detectible in lab tests to an extent but there's no single clear diagnostic test.

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It's long as in persistent viral colonization, often in immune privileged areas where the virus can hide from the immune system.

One theory is that the immune system doesn't always produce a strong enough antibody response to flush the virus from all these areas but the truth is that's likely only a subset of total cases.

they are pretty well understood now with growing evidence of viral persistence in the gut and immune cells, and immune dysfunction causing autoantibodies.

they are also distinct from other conditions like ME/CFS or other sequelae although they may share overlapping symptoms. A lot of research is going into different PAIS post acute infection syndromes

Isnt CFS notoriously post-viral?

evidence says yes, but bacteria and other antigens are being studied. ME/CFS shows antigen persistence like long covid has clearly shown.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45107-3

Interesting, then I guess the obvious next question is … is there a test for being a susceptible patient? We’ve been talking about long COVID for years now. Surely there’s some commonalities amongst the people who suffer from it.

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