Three clinics specialising in the treatment of Long Covid will open their doors on November 1 at teaching hospitals in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Maastricht.

Family doctors can refer patients, many of whom have struggled with Covid-related symptoms for the last four years, from that date.

Some 1.3 million people still suffered from the consequences of an infection with the virus after three months. Over half have recovered but some 450,000 people are still limited in their daily activities while 100,000 are almost entirely incapacitated, experts say.

The initial intake focuses on people who have had symptoms for longer than a year, have lost at least 25% of their normal ability to function and who don’t have other illnesses that might explain their symptoms.

The hospitals hope to be able to treat 500 to 1,000 patients in the first months, coordinator and chairman of the Post Covid expertise team Léon van den Toorn told the AD.

“That is a fraction of the total but we hope that others profit from what we learn in the clinics,” he said.

The clinics will register symptoms using questionnaires and patients will be given the same medical examinations, after which the most appropriate treatment can be chosen, Van den Toorn said.

Patients with extreme tiredness, for example, can be given naltrexone, which has been shown to help but whose effects have not been properly monitored. “We will do that here so we can give considered advice on its use,” lung specialist Merel Hellemons told the paper.

All the treatments on offer are experimental, Hellemons said, but have been shown to mitigate symptoms. By making all post covid patients take the same medical route, doctors hope to find treatments which will help large groups of them and, eventually, find a cure.

“We are far from finding a cure but we are now putting the pieces of the puzzle together. If we find that even four or five of the treatments may work we will be very happy,”  Van den Toorn said.

Other hospitals are expected to open their own post Covid clinics in the following months.