Though the COVID-19 pandemic has largely faded from the public mind, infections are still very common and not always benign like the flu. There is a link between inflammation, the immune system and COVID-19 that is not yet quite understood — and it could still be causing thousands of deaths and disabilities.
As Salon has previously reported, severe cases of COVID can trigger a hyperinflammatory response called a "cytokine storm" so intense that it seems to exhaust the T cells critical to immune function and decrease their number. There has been evidence to suggest this can impact the immune system's ability to fight future infections from both COVID-19 and other diseases as well. More recently, researchers found that the inflammation caused by COVID-19 in pregnant women led to an inflammatory response in their infants causing respiratory distress after birth.
