SPOKANE, Wash. – As we learn to live with COVID-19, there remains much we don’t know about the virus, such as the effects of long term COVID. Which is why there is a new initiative funded by the NIH to study those long term symptoms.
The initiative, dubbed RECOVER (REsearching COVID to Enhance Recovery), aims to answer why certain members of the community experience prolonged COVID symptoms, what the symptoms are, and how their health will be impacted down the line.
“It’s a massive, nationwide effort to understand the long term effects of COVID-19, or what is commonly known as ‘Long COVID,’” explained On Ho, Ph.D., who serves as the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) Clinical Trials Senior Program Manager.
Here in Pacific Northwest, Providence Sacred Heart, Swedish, and University of Washington School of Medicine are hoping to study 900 patients over the next four years. Underscoring the project’s importance, Providence Executive Director for Research and Principal Investigator, Dr. Katherine Tuttle said this work will help shape the future of medicine and science.
“These kinds of pandemics change medicine science and culture, frankly,” Dr. Tuttle said. “The world hasn’t been the same since HIV/AIDS, and it became its own medical specialty, and we are still working on it. I think you can expect the same story from COVID, and so it is critically important that we get on top of this early and we do our best to really understand what this disease is.”
If you are interested in learning how you can participate, click here.
