With governments worldwide under pressure to ease pandemic restrictions as vaccination rates rise and impatience with border restrictions grows, new threats become clearer.
One of the costliest, it is now feared, could be a tsunami of “long COVID” cases.
Long COVID is a serious ongoing illness that follows an acute episode of the disease. It is characterised by extreme fatigue, muscle weakness, post-exertional malaise and an inability to concentrate (“brain fog”), among many other symptoms.
The focus, therefore, needs to shift towards protecting quality of life as much as saving lives in the first place.