Doctors Discovered a Surgical Way to Treat Long COVID

In late 2023, Giorgia Lupi described her experience with long COVID in an essay for The New York Times. “As I fully come into consciousness, I feel dizzy, faint and nauseated,” Lupi wrote. “Pain pulses throughout my body, and my limbs feel simultaneously as heavy as concrete and weak as jelly.” Long COVID is one of the most frustrating medical mysteries to emerge from the pandemic, both for the people living with it and for the scientists seeking ways to reduce its effects.

But in the aftermath of a new surgical treatment in London, there may be a path to relief for at least some people dealing with long COVID. As Andrew Gregory writes in The Guardian, doctors at the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust performed surgery on a dozen people with long COVID, and in doing so were able to restore their sense of smell. The procedure itself — functional septorhinoplasty — isn’t new, but it has historically been used to treat obstructions or other issues with someone’s nasal passages. These rounds of surgery in London were the first to use it as a treatment for long COVID.

“With long COVID anosmia, you’ve got patients, fundamentally, who can’t smell or smell very poorly, so we need to somehow wake them up,” Peter Andrews, who headed the research that informed the surgery, told The Guardian. “And this operation sort of does that.”

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There are a number of symptoms of long COVID, and this surgical approach focuses on one of the more prominent issues people have faced. Even if this works well for long COVID patients with taste and smell issues, there will be other aspects of this crisis for doctors to address. But at a time when a lot of research hasn’t led anywhere concrete, it’s heartening to hear about a medical success story.