Hi, and welcome to COVID Quickly, a scientific American podcast series.

This is your fast track update on the COVID pandemic.

We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus

and the disease.

We demystify the research and help you understand what it really means.

I'm Tony Lewis, one of scientific American senior health editors.

Josh is taking the week off.

Today I'm going to talk about how the antiviral pexlovid may protect against long COVID, and

what we know about the effectiveness of the new booster shots.

We've talked a lot about long COVID on this show, lingering symptoms such as fatigue,

brain fog, headache, difficulty breathing, etc.

But so far, there haven't been many effective ways of preventing it.

Vaccination provides some protection, but the only way to totally reduce the risk is avoiding

COVID altogether.

But there's some promising news.

A recent pre-print study of COVID patients with at least one risk factor for severe disease

found that those who took the antiviral pexlovid had a 26% lower chance of developing long

COVID symptoms three months later, compared with the control group.

There were 9,000 patients in the pexlovid group and about 47,000 in the control group.

Those in the pexlovid group had a lower risk of 10 out of 12 long COVID symptoms.

This include an abnormal heart rhythm, ischemic heart disease, pulmonary embolism, deep vein

thrombosis, fatigue, liver disease, muscle pain, diabetes, and cognitive impairment.

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