Patients recovering from coronavirus infections have flocked to online support groups to swap stories of symptoms that wax and wane, but refuse to go away
Becca Blackwood, seen here outside her home in Montreal on July 15, 2020, has experienced prolonged COVID-19 symptoms after getting infected in March.More than a month had passed since Becca Blackwood tested positive for COVID-19 and she was back in a Montreal hospital, unable to walk, struggling to talk and near delirious after a night of stabbing chest pains and vomiting.
For public-health officials, the 14-day window is important because it represents the maximum amount of time COVID-19 patients are believed to be infectious. “Even if only 10 per cent of them have serious knock-on cognitive effects,” Dr. Owen said, “that is a massive societal and economic problem a year from now.”New York City was just coming off the peak of a disastrous first wave when David Putrino and his colleagues at the city’s Mount Sinai Health System noticed that some of their earliest patients seemed unable to shake off their illness.
New York’s Mount Sinai opened a Center for Post-COVID Care in mid-May and the service has since been inundated by patients who fit that description and are looking for help, many of whom had their concerns dismissed by doctors who didn’t believe that COVID-19 could cause such a broad range of long-lasting ailments.
But as the number of worldwide infections has ballooned, the virus has been implicated in skin lesions, the loss of taste and smell, heart problems, strokes, brain damage and other side effects, some of which can be traced back to the virus’s ability to infect the endothelial cells that line blood-vessel walls. The virus also appears to trigger an out-of-control immune reaction, known as a cytokine storm, in some patients.
But mildly or moderately ill COVID-19 patients wouldn’t expect to face such a steep climb back to good health. Yet some do.of 545 COVID-19 patients in Atlanta, none of whom were admitted to hospital, found that just under 5 per cent were still sick enough to require a follow-up call from their doctors six weeks after symptoms began. The study was published on a preprint server, meaning it has not yet been peer reviewed.
Nick Daneman, head of the division of infectious diseases at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, called it “very reassuring” that most patients with mild and moderate illness recover, as expected, within two weeks. Throughout the spring, she experienced a cascade of different symptoms. Shortness of breath. A galloping heartbeat. Numbness in her left arm. Brain fog. Blinding headaches. Deep exhaustion. A loss of taste and smell that made spicy curries taste like gruel.
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