Then, around the start of April, she began a five-day course of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral pill. By her second day on the drug, McGovern “could feel the messaging in my body shifting.” Four weeks later, her fatigue, aches, and labored breathing remain. But the screaming, nerves-on-fire pain that gripped her body for two dozen months “is basically gone,” she told me. She’s recovered some mobility. She’s spending more time with her three young kids. A flutist for nearly three decades, she’s playing her instrument again after a two-year hiatus, “which feels incredible,” like reclaiming a shade of her former self.

To date, no established treatments exist for long COVID. But in recent weeks, a smattering of long-haulers—McGovern among them—have been surprised to feel their sicknesses subside after taking Pfizer’s new drug. The case for treating long COVID with antivirals is far from open-and-shut. But should these anecdotal reports augur a flood of similar data, Paxlovid might offer a surprisingly straightforward fix to one of the pandemic’s biggest puzzles. Long COVID is so ranging, so diverse, so capable of wreaking havoc on a multitude of tissues that treatment, for many, will undoubtedly require the rehabilitation of many bodily systems at once. Maybe, though, for a subset of long-haulers, a few days of antiviral pills could be all it takes to rev the healing process into gear.