It has been three years into the pandemic, and the medical community has yet to completely solve the mystery of long COVID. But this week, an authority shared what may very well be liable for this mind-boggling phenomenon. 

In accordance with Brent Palmer, Ph.D., an associate professor of allergy and clinical immunology on the University of Colorado School of Medicine, viral reservoirs that linger within the body may very well be causing the immune system to stay overactive for long periods, resulting in persistent symptoms. 

“We predict it’s an overexaggerated immune response that’s causing the issue. What we hypothesize is that there’s residual virus somewhere within the body, nevertheless it’s not detected by a nasal swab. It has been shown that individuals who died of severe acute COVID had virus throughout their body. After they do autopsies on these individuals, they will find virus within the brain, the kidney, the lung, and the gut,” Palmer explained in a news release.  

Last June, David R. Walt and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School also proposed an analogous idea after detecting SARS-CoV-2 proteins within the blood of 65% of long COVID patients as much as 12 months after their acute infection. 

“The half-life of spike protein within the body is pretty short, so its presence indicates that there should be some form of lively viral reservoir,” Walt explained on the time, noting that spike protein was not detected within the blood of COVID-19 patients without long-term symptoms. 

For Palmer, vaccines and antiviral medication similar to Paxlovid will help relieve symptoms of long COVID. The 2 help the immune system yield a greater antibody response against the virus, reducing the possibilities of developing long-term symptoms. 

“There have been studies in individuals with long COVID which have shown that vaccination causes a modest decrease in symptoms. Should you vaccinate them, you bump up their immune response much more, perhaps you get a greater antibody response, you root out these viral reservoirs, and that results in reduced symptoms. Other studies have shown that giving patients Paxlovid can suppress viral replication, and once the viral application is suppressed, the virus-specific immune response will drop off,” he said.