What We Do
The human and economic impacts of Long Covid are far-reaching, ongoing and devastating for patients, their families and their communities. The complexities of Long Covid—that it requires multiple specialists for successful treatment, that it affects people around the world and, often, far from needed medical care, that it is difficult to diagnose—require a systems approach. SILC seeks to address these challenges through three areas of work: webinar-based medical training, virtual collaboration for patient care, and large-scale, AI and machine-learning driven research.
What is Long Covid?
Patients who have not returned to a pre-Covid 19 state of health months after the end of an acute infection may have Long Covid. Also called Post Covid Condition or Post Acute Sequelae of Covid, Long Covid typically involves a continuation or development of new symptoms three months after initial infection.
The symptoms of Long Covid typically last for at least two months, with no other underlying cause. Although there are more than 200 possible symptoms and no single diagnostic test, Long Covid is most commonly associated with fatigue that interferes with daily life, difficulty breathing or shortness of breath, heart palpitations and difficulties concentrating.
Communities of Practice
We maintain virtual Communities of Practice (vCOP) to connect subject matter experts and clinicians to disseminate best practices, discuss cases and obtain specialty consultation on Long Covid cases. Through weekly Zoom sessions, we link central specialists at nine locations worldwide with peripheral primary providers across 82 countries. Alongside the virtual component, SILC works to strengthen local healthcare infrastructure at the nine vCOP hubs.
Webinars
Monthly webinars, led by our team and featuring both medical and patient perspectives, educate providers worldwide on the latest developments in Long Covid diagnosis, treatment and research. We address all aspects of Long Covid—including neurocognitive, pulmonary and autonomic/cardiac manifestations—and offer deep-dives into patient perspectives, strategies for symptom management, the role of physical therapy in recovery and pediatric post-Covid conditions.
Each webinar is facilitated by subject matter experts, begins with a concise presentation about emerging promising practices and models of care and concludes with a Q&A. Thanks to our partnership with Project ECHO, which has been designated by the World Health Organization as the first Collaborating Center for Digital Learning in Health Emergencies, the series is available worldwide, with morning and evening versions to accommodate all time zones and simultaneous interpretation in Spanish, French, Arabic and Portuguese.
34
webinars to date
5,546
attendees
49
webinar lecturers, facilitators and panelists
149
countries represented in audience
Clinical Research
SILC commissions and convenes partners globally to research the Long Covid experience, potential treatments and new diagnostics, working with the largest set of patient and proteomic data of any similar studies. SILC-supported researchers are studying the symptoms of 6,000 patients and looking for clues in their blood—particularly the behavior of thousands of proteins and hundreds of biological markers—to determine the pathology of Long Covid and why and how it persists. Then, using AI, researchers cross-reference this patient data with every FDA-approved drug to see if known medicines can be used to help Long Covid patients, another first in the field.
In the future, SILC and its research partners—including Western University in Ontario, Canada, Family Health Centers of San Diego, the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz in Rio de Janeiro, the Zambian Ministry of Health and University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, and McGill University in Montreal— aim to use this information to find therapeutics and improved tests for Long Covid.
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