Dr. Ciaran Bannan:

This still needs to be teased out. One thing we recognised early on in our clinic was that many of the pateints coming to us were not the patients who had gone through ICU. Plenty of patients came back from the ICU some six to eight weeks later and told us they felt like new people and were 100% back to normal. Other people then, who had mild Covid-19 infections, were hit hard by subsequent symptoms. The severity of the initial infection, therefore, does not appear to be a major risk factor for the development of long Covid symptoms. We are trying, as I said, to tease out what risk factors, be those genetic, gender or underlying conditions, are associated with the development of long Covid. We know some of these already, and they include age, gender and underlying comorbidities.