The Long, Long Road to Treating Long COVID

Lisa Sanders made a name for herself as a doctor-detective who wrote about patients' medical mysteries. But what happens when the mystery is too difficult to solve?

- Lisa Miller

LISA SANDERS WAS AT a large birthday party in New Haven in April 2022. It was a spring evening, lovely enough for the party to spill out onto the lawn. Sanders, an internal-medicine doctor at Yale, was leaning against a doorway drinking a glass of wine and catching up with her friend Erica Spatz, a cardiologist, when Spatz mentioned that she and a few other doctors had the idea of starting a new long-COVID clinic at Yale. They were looking for an internist to run it.

The problem was one of volume, Spatz explained. Since the beginning of the pandemic, she—together with colleagues in the pulmonary and neurology departments— had been seeing long-covid patients at Yale but often in an ad hoc way. Some of the doctors had become so flooded with people seeking help that they were having difficulty scheduling and treating their regular patients who came to them for everything else: lung cancer, asthma, heart disease, dementia. “My practice is so overwhelmed,” Spatz told Sanders.