It's established that COVID can persist in tissue/blood - particularly in immunocompromised patients - and is associated with long COVID [1]. This abstract only reports a cut-off of >60 days from COVID infection, so it's hard to know how many of these deceased patients are truly outside the acute infection phase.

Although this research area is the most promising avenue for long COVID -- wrt biologic rationale -- the major anti-viral trials for long COVID were negative.

STOP-PASC trial [2] and PAXLC [3] were both 15-day courses of Paxlovid and showed no benefit across patient reported outcomes.

The real question however, is whether anti-virals have benefit in patients with active viral replication. Like only cases of long COVID can be implicated to viral persistence.

STOP-PASC did collect stool PCR at baseline, but every tested sample was negative. PAX LC later reported a exploratory biomarker analysis of 82 PAX LC participants did measure circulating SARS-CoV-2 S1 and full-length Spike, and wasn't powered to find a difference. Notably, spike presence doesn't necessarily mean active viral replication [4].

As an aside, mchusma's post is probably right. Viral disease is not being associated with more and more long term diseases. EBV is being linked to MS, cervical cancer to HPV, and so on.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147330992... [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40188838 [4] www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.24.26347001v1.full