When COVID-19 upended the world in 2020, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly was studying climate change, medication side effects and other big data questions.
“My COVID story, before the pandemic, we were doing a lot of research on lots of other things,” said Al-Aly, who is the director of the clinical epidemiology center at Washington University, and chief of research and education service at the VA St. Louis Health Care System. “And then when the pandemic hit, we sort of switched because we saw the country in crisis dealing with COVID. At that time, we did not know anything about long COVID. So we pivoted to studying COVID and then subsequently studying long COVID out of this feeling in our team that the country was in crisis and we wanted to pitch in and help.”
That shift led to discoveries that reshaped his understanding of pandemics altogether…