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"It looks like those people's immune systems have largely returned to what we would expect," says Gail Matthews, an infectious disease physician at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, who led the study. "And that's really good." The study doesn't explain why some long COVID patients did not get better, but this could be due to other underlying health conditions, says Matthews. However, there is evidence of significant improvements in both immunological disturbances and the self-reported health of many patients two years post-COVID. "It's good news for those with long COVID that there seems to be resolution of not only immune perturbations but also symptoms over time," says Nadia Roan, an immunologist at The J. David Gladstone Institutes at the University of California San Francisco. The blood markers of long COVID Scientists at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, began collecting blood samples from some COVID-19 patients in April 2020 when the first wave of the pandemic hit Australia. These patients regularly self-report their health information and were not vaccinated when they got COVID-19 because the shots were not available in Australia until early 2021. In 2022, scientists found that immune-system molecules related to inflammation remained abnormally high in the blood of patients who felt fatigue, shortness of breath, or chest pain, eight months after infection. The levels of these molecules, called cytokines, should return to normal levels within 30-90 days