Overview

• The PLOS Pathogens paper reports a six-month follow-up of delta-infected rhesus macaques revealing both obesity-dependent and obesity-independent long COVID effects.
• Obese macaques exhibited sustained lung pathology, including bronchioloalveolar hyperplasia and prolonged weight loss after initially mild infections.
• Lean subjects experienced a marked decline in their adiponectin-to-leptin ratio, indicating new-onset metabolic disruption months after infection.
• Many long-term changes were physiological rather than symptomatic, implying that long COVID may be more prevalent than self-reported human data suggests.
• Researchers plan to leverage this naïve macaque model under NIH support to compare post-acute outcomes of delta and omicron variants.