Long COVID Researchers - Viral Persistence Biology

Five years ago I caught a virus and never fully got better. The people who know me know what I was like before this. Ambitious to a fault. The one who brings the most energy into the room, takes the extra project, doesn't stop. An illness can take all of that overnight. Mine did. I persist anyway. Slower, with a lot more planning, and with a much better sense of what a day costs. But I persist. When I got sick I did the only thing I actually know how to do, which is go find out. I didn't look for answers on social media. There is a staggering amount of confident nonsense about this disease and I wanted the real thing, so I went to the papers. Then I went to the people writing them. That turned into serving on the NIH RECOVER biospecimen access committee. Helping design a RECOVER-TLC trial. Reviewing manuscripts. Interviewing twice at ARPA-H. I have a day job in tech that I love. This became the other one. Here is what I learned. There is now real evidence that pieces of this virus can linger in human tissue long after the infection is called over. Viral RNA in the gut months later. Spike protein still circulating a year out. Activated immune cells turning up in the brainstem and spinal cord, where they have no business being. This is not a mystery illness. It is a disease with a biology, and that biology is finally coming into focus. So I'm writing a book about it. It's called Persistence. The title means two things and I mean both. There is the virus that won't leave the body. And there are the people who won't leave the question alone, the patients and the scientists who kept working while the world moved on. Sometimes life hands you a detour you have to chase, because nobody else is going to chase it for you. This is mine. My kids are going to look back on this someday. I don't need them to remember that their dad got sick. I want them to remember what he did about it. I won't tell you a cure is close, because it isn't yet. But the science is real and it is moving, and it is the thing that will end this. Not willpower. Not positive thinking. Research, funded and finished. I'll be interviewing researchers over the coming months. If you work in this field, I'd love to hear from you. And if you're sick and reading this, you were never imagining it.