Long-COVID treatments: why the world is still waiting

Bhasha Mewar has had it with doctors. Over the past two years, Mewar has spent nearly all of her life savings seeing heart and respiratory specialists, haematologists, urologists, dermatologists and more, in a desperate bid to tame her long-COVID symptoms. She has taken a slew of drugs: beta blockers to calm her racing heart, steroid inhalers to ease her laboured breathing and an antimalarial drug prescribed to her for reasons she never fully understood. And when Mewar — a curator at an art museum in Ahmedabad, India, who has been sick since what was probably a bout of COVID-19 in March 2020 — would visit her lung doctor twice a month, he always told her the same thing: you need to exercise. “I can’t even walk to the bathroom,” she would reply.