Long COVID may be due to the virus sticking around after infection, researchers say

Brent Palmer’s research on long COVID started before that phrase meant anything. Palmer had some friends who’d caught the virus while on a ski trip. It was March 2020. And they’d returned home with this new illness. Palmer works at the University of Colorado, where he studies how the immune system responds to infectious diseases. So this was too good to pass up. He started collecting their blood and was intrigued by one person in particular.