Igniting the slow burn of post-COVID conditions

Post-COVID conditions (PCCs) are persistent new patient symptoms occurring after acute COVID-19 infection and are an increasingly appreciated dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic. The factors that cause PCCs are not well understood. In recent work, Gebo et al. identify a connection between acute IL-6 levels, early COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CP) administration, and later PCCs in subjects from a randomized controlled trial of acutely ill subjects enrolled in 2020 to 2021 (K. A. Gebo, S. L. Heath, Y. Fukuta, X. Zhu, et al., mBio e00618-23, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.00618-23). These results may be viewed as part of an emerging picture linking the intensity of inflammatory responses during acute infection to later PCCs.