Your questions, answered Is there a way to find out if your symptoms are long covid? Like a blood test? "The short answer is no," said David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation for Mount Sinai Health System in New York. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a clinical diagnosis for long covid, with physicians using your medical history combined with your current symptoms. But that could change, Putrino said. South African researcher Resia Pretorius has published papers showing that most people with long covid symptoms display biomarkers in their blood like platelet pathology and micro-clots. U.S. researchers are waiting on funding from the National Institutes of Health to see whether they can replicate those results. Other scientists are looking for evidence in the immune system or of the virus lingering in the body, which could also lead to diagnostic tests. In the meantime, whether or not you have long covid, it's important to get good care — and again we're waiting for solid scientific research to help with that. "If it's not covid, we should also be treating them appropriately," said Katherine R. Tuttle, a nephrologist at the University of Washington who is working on a NIH initiative to study long covid, which will include people who appear to have symptoms of long covid even if they did not have a specific covid diagnosis. | 
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