PEORIA, Ill. – Medical professionals are in a better position to deal with the effects of COVID-19 now and in the future.
Dr. Doug Kasper, Infectious Disease Specialist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria, tells WMBD’s “Greg and Dan” the potency of the virus is not what it once was, when the pandemic was starting a few years ago.
“Even with transmission occurring in the community, we still hear people test positive and have some symptoms. But, in the hospital, we’ve seen really low activity, sometimes even no activity,” Kasper said.
Kasper says that doctors and medical professionals are now looking into the effects of long COVID. He says one of the key symptoms has been found in the body’s nervous system, which helps regulate body temperature and blood pressure and can be affected by long COVID.
Kasper says researchers are also looking into how to attack and minimize the effects of COVID, which could include a different approach in developing vaccines against the virus.
“Instead of creating vaccines that are targeted to emerging variants, it’s actually working backwards and try to create a vaccine that would catch COVID higher on its family tree,” Kasper said.
Kasper says developing a vaccine such as that would limit the impact of individual variants that emerge. And says some of the research in creating a vaccine like that could have other uses.
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