Dr. Brian Kent:

Something we learned very much in the early stages of the pandemic when people were being admitted to hospital with Covid-related illnesses was the importance of only using treatments where we had some evidence that they worked. There were treatments used in an experimental fashion in the early stages of Covid that subsequently proved to be harmful for patients when they were properly studied in properly conducted trials. At the moment, there is no approved medication for long Covid in and of itself. Trials are ongoing in other jurisdictions, particularly the US, of different types of medication as potential treatments for different aspects of long Covid. For example, there are trials of anti-Covid viral medications that we hope will show some efficacy in improving long Covid-related symptoms but at the moment, there are no medications that we know will work for Covid in the context of persistent symptoms. An important lesson we learned from the earlier stages of the pandemic is that it is really not in the interests of the people who come to Covid clinics for us to throw medication at them with us having no real evidence that they will be of benefit to them.