What is Long COVID?

Previous ISAC webinars have discussed the major impact on health caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite rapid global efforts to develop diagnostics and treatments, sequence COVID strains and the huge achievement to develop and deploy effective vaccines, there are aspects of the underlying disease that remain poorly understood. Millions of patients with COVID (possibly 1 in 5) report symptoms lasting more than four weeks. This webinar will explore long COVID which may represent several syndromes including post-viral fatigue, lasting organ damage or post-intensive care symptoms; its pathology, immunology and impact.

Speaker bios

Vanya Gant oversees the treatment of patients in leukaemia, lymphoma, myeloma, bone marrow transplant and CAR T cell treatment programmes at University College London Hospital in London. He is Clinical Principal Investigator in INHALE, a National research programme investigating the impact of rapid diagnostics on critically ill patients. He has a PhD in cellular Immunology and believes that the host is as important as the pathogen in the expression of human infectious disease. He is also a DJ, rides fast motorbikes, paraglides and currently lives in France.

Işın Ünal Çevik is a Neurologist, Neuroscientist, and Pain Specialist in the Department of Neurology, Hacettepe University, Faculty of Medicine, Ankara, Turkey. She completed her medical education, neurology residency, and neuroscience Ph.D. programmess at Hacettepe University, and Pain Medicine clinical fellowship programme in Harvard Medical School, MGH, Boston, USA.
Professor Ünal Çevik maintains active clinical and experimental research and educational programmes in neurology, with interests centered on neuropathic pain and headaches. Her publications have been accepted for inclusion in peer-reviewed journals, in neurology, neuroscience, and pain. In addition to her clinical duties, Professor Ünal Çevik speaks regularly at regional and international conferences.

Menno de Jong is clinical microbiologist, professor of clinical virology and heads the Department of Medical Microbiology & Infection Prevention at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers. Inspired by his work on avian influenza at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam during the 2000s, his research interests and activities remain focused on (preparedness for) clinical and translational research on influenza and other (re-)emerging respiratory viruses, including Covid-19 since 2020. He has published over 250 scientific papers on a range of topics related to microbiology and infectious diseases.

Itzchak Levy is a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine of Hadassah and the Hebrew University. He specialized in internal medicine at Beilinson Medical Center and infectious diseases at Sheba Medical Center.
He founded the AIDS center in 1992 and runs the clinic for HIV and sexually transmitted diseases at Sheba Medical Center. Since May 2020 he runs the "long Covid" outpatient clinic and is involved in the Covid-19 vaccination research in immunocompromised host.
Senior Lecturer in the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.
Published more than fifty articles in the scientific literature.