While there were many tumultuous times that defined the experience of living in 2020, it’s pretty obvious that the big, scary elephant in the room was and continues to be the COVID-19 pandemic. And while its potentially lethal effects had a lot to do with that, it also seemed that the more we learned about the coronavirus, the more concerning it became.
Because while it’s hardly the first deadly disease the world has had to deal with, few before it have been as easy to spread to others without realizing it.
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And the virus’ grim outlook wasn’t helped by the fact that by the summer, it became increasingly clear just how severely some people can be affected. Between the potential to experience symptoms for months at a time and the brain issues that can develop as a result of infection, we learned a hard lesson that COVID-19 was somehow even worse than we thought.
And while the research on this phenomenon among COVID-19 patients is still fairly scarce, we are starting to see studies that confirm the virus’ most debilitating effects and give us a sense of how long dealing with “long COVID” can really take.
When the COVID-19 pandemic was only a few months old, some patients found themselves in a particularly unenviable situation.
As Scientific American reported , although they had supposedly recovered from the disease, they still found their symptoms persisting weeks after their last negative test.
And since this tends to take the form of various and sometimes nebulous symptoms, many of these patients encountered disbelief in their continued experience when they sought medical help. And even when health care workers did believe them, it’s not as if it was any more clear to them what could be done about these “long haul” symptoms.
As immunologist Danny Altmann at London’s Imperial College estimated, “We probably have way more than five million people on the planet with long COVID.”
And since the symptoms of “long COVID” patients were often just as debilitating as they were persistent, the need to better understand this facet of COVID-19 became clear.
As The Guardian reported , this has led a group of long COVID patients who are also researchers to survey 3,762 people from 56 different countries in the hopes of getting a fix on the scope of their experiences.
This survey was particularly targeting people who had experienced their symptoms for longer than 28 days and who first experienced them before June of 2020.
Although this study has yet to be peer-reviewed, it is nonetheless one of the largest to date on the subject.
By the time the results came in, patients had recorded 205 different symptoms across 10 different organ systems, with the average patient surveyed experiencing symptoms in nine of these systems.
As The Guardian reported , 2,454 of the survey’s participants (roughly 65%) continued experiencing symptoms for at least six months.
These “long haul” symptoms tended to include fatigue (particularly after physical activity), cognitive dysfunction or “brain fog,” headaches, memory loss, muscle aches, shortness of breath, dizziness, palpitations, insomnia, and issues with speech and language.
And for 86% of respondents, these symptoms could appear to go away only to relapse in times of stress, physical activity, or mental strain.
According to The Guardian , about 85% of these long COVID patients experienced neurological symptoms like memory loss and brain fog, which impacted their ability to work as 45% of participants reported reduced work schedules compared to the days before they contracted the virus, while 22% weren’t able to work at all.
It’s worth noting that this study has some key limitations.
As The Guardian reported , the survey’s participants were recruited from support groups, so they aren’t necessarily representative of the general population, particularly when we take into account that those of more vulnerable socioeconomic status are at higher risk of contracting the virus.
It’s also important to note that the majority of respondents had at least one pre-existing condition like allergies, migraine, or asthma and that less than a third of them had a confirmed COVID-19 infection.
Public health professor Nisreen Alwan at the University of Southampton also noted that those who recovered from long COVID were less likely to complete the survey in full, which could also effect the data.
However, there is still much for future researchers to gain from this study’s findings.
According to The Guardian , this survey provided some insight into less common COVID-19 symptoms such as the development of new allergies, facial paralysis, impaired vision or hearing, and seizures.
As Altmann said, “This is a chapter that has not yet been written in the medical textbooks, and barely any major research papers yet published. Part of the progress here is simply inputting large numbers and stats to the existing anecdotal sense of what’s been happening, while aspects feel really quite novel.
“Nobody can address the condition until we’re better able to narrate what’s happening.”
h/t: The Guardian
