Pretorius penned the Guardian article that caught Hawthorne’s attention.īut many haematologists and COVID-19 researchers worry that enthusiasm for the clot hypothesis has outpaced the data. They say that the evidence implicating micro-clots is undeniable, and they want trials of the kinds of anticoagulant treatment that Hawthorne is considering. Proponents of the idea (#teamclots, as they sometimes refer to themselves on Twitter) include Etheresia Pretorius, a physiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and Douglas Kell, a systems biologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, who led the first team to visualize micro-clots in the blood of people with long COVID. Heart disease after COVID: what the data say Now some scientists, and an increasing number of people with the condition, have been lining up behind the as-yet-unproven hypothesis that tiny, persistent clots might be constricting blood flow to vital organs, resulting in the bizarre constellation of symptoms that people experience. Researchers are baffled by long COVID: hundreds of studies have tried to unpick its mechanism, without much success. “I don’t want to wait on my health when I’m feeling so dreadful,” she says. She hasn’t heard back yet - rumour has it that people stay on the waiting list for months - but if she has the opportunity to head there for these unproven treatments, she probably will. After reading an opinion piece in The Guardian newspaper about how blood clots might be to blame for long COVID symptoms, Hawthorne contacted a physician in Germany who is treating people with blood thinners and a procedure to filter the blood. Unable to find relief, she became increasingly desperate.

When she finally saw her physician, the diagnosis was what she had been dreading: long COVID. On some days, Hawthorne felt so weak that she could not get out of bed.

But months later, she was still sick with a variety of often debilitating symptoms: earaches, tinnitus, congestion, headaches, vertigo, heart palpitations, muscle pain and more. When Lara Hawthorne, an illustrator in Bristol, UK, began developing strange symptoms after having COVID-19, she hoped that they weren’t due to the virus.

Vertigo after covid vaccine