Commenting on Britain’s near-record-high number of Covid cases, the U.K.’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, said last Wednesday that we should expect seasonal peaks for the next few years, interspersed with new variants of SARS-CoV-2.
As we move into the post-pandemic, living-with-the-virus era, more research is surfacing about the ways even mild Covid cases leave lingering effects on health in some people. Three conditions in particular are capturing scientists’ attention due to the large number of sufferers: increased rates of diabetes, neuropsychological problems, and the illness known as long Covid. Researchers have found associations between Covid infections and each of these issues, but we don’t know enough yet to establish causality.
