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More and more Covid 19 patients are reporting long-lasting and sometimes drastic health problems. Doctors estimate that one in three suffers from it. A woman from Zurich tells how she suddenly had to depend on the walker.
The 43-year-old art historian did not know for weeks that she was infected with the corona virus. The doctor initially suspects that allergic asthma is the cause of your dry cough.
Until the beginning of April, art historian FI was a cheerful, enterprising and sporty woman. The 43-year-old juggled her life as a mother of two, wife and owner of an interior decoration company in the canton of Zurich. Today he only goes out with the walker and some days he can talk or walk. “A few days ago, for the first time in months, I smelled the smell of fresh bread when I walked into the bakery,” she says by phone. You can tell the joy in his voice.
His suffering began in mid-April with a dry cough. “I wanted to be responsible for the Corona situation and I went to the doctor, but I wasn’t worried at the time,” she says. His GP suspected allergic asthma and prescribed an inhalant. The Sars-CoV-2 test was not performed because she did not have a fever and did not belong to the risk group.
In hindsight, you know you had another typical Covid-19 symptom, namely that you had changes in your sense of taste and smell early on. “For me, an apple pie made by my husband was too salty, the rest of the family found it very tasty.” FI did not discover a dead mouse that the cat had placed in the guest bathroom; her husband was already ill when he opened the front door.
An elephant on the chest
Three weeks after the first cough, a dance began for the Zurich woman with sometimes dramatic complaints. “At first I was totally exhausted, then followed by shortness of breath and leaden fatigue. I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. Some days I fell asleep while talking, ”he reports. In the following weeks, oppressive nausea and headaches followed.
At the end of May, at the initiative of FI, an antibody test was carried out which was positive, apparently he had been infected with Sars-CoV-2 in the previous weeks. So now he had an explanation for his complaints. And they went from bad to worse. I had severe shaking in the summer and couldn’t even walk to the bathroom. He would wake up at night with a racing heart and could no longer sleep. Suddenly I couldn’t write some words anymore. His brain felt completely confused. “I was completely torn from my life”, is the conclusion of F.
The art historian belongs to the group of so-called long-term Covid-19 patients, called “longhauler” or “long-covid” in English. Little is known about this so far, which is understandable in light of the new Covid-19 disease, so to speak. But that makes it even more difficult for those affected. There is no official description of his condition, but there are many individual reports. According to these reports, in almost everyone affected, total exhaustion with even the slightest effort is a permanent condition for weeks or even months. Respiratory problems also occur very frequently. Furthermore, neurological deficits and wandering pain appear to be widespread. Some patients report a long sequence of complaints that alternate constantly, others experience several problems at the same time.
Will long-term patients ever recover?
There is no therapy yet. Currently, no doctor dares to predict whether and when long-term Covid 19 patients will be fully healthy again. Also, no one knows how many infected people are affected. A survey of Korean Covid-19 patients treated at the hospital showed that 9 out of 10 complained of lead fatigue, psychological problems or neurological deficiencies even weeks after their acute infection.
In follow-up exams of Covid-19 patients in Bergamo, who were also treated in the hospital, 30 percent still suffer from breathing difficulties and a third more from persistent heart disease and blood clotting disorders. Currently, doctors estimate that a total of a third of all Covid 19 patients suffer from long-term discomfort, but in varying degrees of severity. For those who had to be treated in intensive care units, it was even 80 percent.
With several other illnesses, there are longer recovery times after a week-long stay in an intensive care unit. But as the stories of FI or numerous affected people from other countries show, long-term symptoms in Covid-19 patients by no means only occur after a severe course. Similar long-term effects in previously mildly or severely ill people suggest that coronavirus directly causes long-lasting, and sometimes severe, damage.
“Online self-help groups have been very helpful to me,” says FI. “Here I received valuable advice from fellow sufferers. In addition, the mere fact of seeing that I am not alone, that I am not crazy, that nobody rules out my problems such as stress or psychological suffering due to the crisis of the global crown, was of great help and stabilization. “These groups have exploded like mushrooms on social media in recent weeks, some of them, like the Slack groups, started by “Body Politics” activists, have many thousands of members and the number is increasing.
In the canton of Zurich, Constanze Jackson founded the association “Living with Corona” in early September. She and her husband were infected with Sars-CoV-2 in March. Although the caregiver had only very mild symptoms, her husband struggled for his life in the intensive care unit for weeks. And now normality. Instead of crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat as planned, he now practices biking a few hundred meters or climbing stairs without rest. “We want to impart knowledge or advice for everyday life to patients with long-term complaints, but also to their families, and offer them the opportunity to exchange experiences,” explains Mantel. The association currently has almost twenty members.
Affected people were not evaluated
A common problem with many long-term patients, especially in the US or Great Britain, is that they did not receive an acute phase CRP test (if any) or an antibody test during their subsequent period of distress. Especially in the early days of the pandemic, testing was so sparse in many countries that not even all people infected with severe and typical Covid 19 symptoms were tested. People now suffer from FI-like symptoms they can find out if their problems really stem from the virus or test it. As a result, they are often denied recognition entirely by physicians and those around them, they report.
The WHO recently recognized the problem of the never-ending Covid 19 disease and promised that long-term complaints would now be scientifically investigated.
FI slowly sees a light at the end of the tunnel. “For the first time in a few days, I have the feeling that I am back on track,” she says, quietly optimistic. Still not quite confident in the situation, too often, after a slight improvement, there has been a severe setback.
