NEW YORK CITY: My first patient that day was a woman in her early 40s, an avid marathon runner who had contracted COVID-19 in March 2020. Now, 13 months later, she noted that she still felt fatigued and short of breath.
She also noticed her heart was racing whenever she walked around. She reported having daily headaches, numbness and tingling in her legs, and difficulty with memory, which had affected her work.
This woman was coming in to see me, a neurologist specialising in infectious diseases, for symptoms that we physicians now all-too-commonly know as long, or long-haul, COVID-19.
While we have yet to determine a precise definition for long COVID-19, we typically consider it the persistence or development of new symptoms that last more than four weeks after COVID-19 recovery.
Long COVID-19 often involves a constellation of symptoms affecting many parts of the body, but the most commonly reported are fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pains, cognitive changes, headaches, sensory changes and pain.
A year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains unclear how many people are affected by long COVID-19. Some data suggests 4.5 per cent of people infected with COVID-19, or about 1 in 22, will have symptoms beyond eight weeks post-COVID, while other studies point to closer to 49 per cent.
Some studies show that among people hospitalised for COVID-19, up to 63 per cent continued to have symptoms – specifically fatigue or muscle weakness – six months later.
