I think we will certainly be able to distinguish the patients who have long COVID from the patients who had COVID but did not develop long-term symptoms, although that becomes even more concrete when you look at the evolution over time, because not everyone will go on to develop long COVID exactly at the same time point, or the symptoms might not be picked up or diagnosed at exactly the time point that one would want.
Of course, with the fact that there are more and more cases of COVID, what you lose is the cohort of patients who never got COVID, so your negative controls so to speak, which help you understand a little bit, tease out some of the background of the infection itself and how that distinguishes it from long COVID. That being said, this highlights all the more the need for, yes, larger cohorts that are followed longitudinally and, yes, diagnostic biomarkers. But the diagnostic biomarkers will have another purpose as well. They may help tease out the diagnosis of long COVID from other illnesses that have some similarities or some overlap. They will also be a support for the clinicians who might not be able to fully grasp all of the symptoms and all of the nuances of this complex entity. It's in that sense, too, that we would like.... People deal well with an objective finding, so if we could find that, it would be helpful.