Though research has shown that people with long COVID are more likely to be unemployed, the statistics don’t reveal what patients go through before they cut their hours, stop working or lose their jobs. In a new study involving interviews of people with long COVID, researchers describe how the prolonged illness has affected not only patients’ job status, but also their overall well-being.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic not only threatened individuals’ physical health but also seriously strained mental health and access to care. A new study analyzed police data from one U.S. city before and after the start of the pandemic to examine whether the frequency of mental health calls for service and police-initiated stops for mental health reasons changed. Police involvement in responding to mental health situations changed slightly after COVID-19 began, with the greatest impact related to dispatched calls in early 2020.

This study highlights how an online dialogic teaching approach in a university media literacy class fostered students' global awareness, critical solidarity, and a sense of community when the media provided conflicting narratives of us versus them during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers from Boston Children's Hospital Precision Vaccines Program have developed a new in vitro system that provides a nimbler way to predict vaccine responses in people of different ages, allowing multiple vaccine doses and vaccine adjuvants to be tested simultaneously in samples from the same person.

Petrovax has announced positive results stemming from the Long-CoV-III-21 trial, which tested the efficacy of bovhyaluronidase azoximer (Longidaza) in patients with long-term COVID-19 pulmonary sequelae. The drug significantly reduced exertional desaturation by 62% and exertional dyspnea by 27%, with improvements lasting over 100 days. Subgroup analysis revealed benefits in patients with cardiovascular comorbidities and those infected with earlier SARS-CoV-2 variants. The study, which was led by Dr. Sergey Avdeev, suggests Longidaza’s potential for treating post-COVID pulmonary issues and the benefits of repurposing existing drugs that are already successfully utilized in other capacities. The study also highlights the need for further research into hyaluronidase-based therapies for fibrotic conditions.

In an effort to make large-scale disease testing faster and more affordable, researchers have developed an optimized approach to pooled testing, which could transform public health screening for infectious diseases.

Researchers Dr. Md S. Warasi, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Radford University in Virginia and Dr. Kumer P. Das, Assistant Vice President for Research and Innovation at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, found that by strategically grouping specimens in pools, testing costs can be slashed without compromising accuracy—a breakthrough that comes as health systems grapple with high demand for screening across diseases like HIV, gonorrhea, and COVID-19.