The National Institutes of Health announced Wednesday that it was awarding nearly $470 million to New York University Langone Health for research into the long-term effects of COVID-19 to ramp up an unprecedented national effort to study so-called "long COVID."
The federal money will be divvied up by NYU to fund more than 100 researchers at institutions around the country, accelerating work to build a sweeping "meta-cohort" encompassing thousands COVID-19 survivors of various ages and backgrounds who are still experiencing symptoms more than a month after their initial infection.
"The only way we're going to sort this out is with very large studies that collect lots and lots of data about symptoms, physical findings, and laboratory measures," NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins told reporters at a briefing Wednesday.