What I’ve learned about long-term Covid-19 has forced me to mentally reframe the risk factors and the way the future could play out
Five months ago, I wrote about my sister, a junior doctor at a large hospital, and my fears for her as she worked on what is frequently described as “the frontline” of the Covid-19 crisis, as if she were a soldier at war, as opposed to someone who just wanted to make people feel better.
Well, grab me a turban and call me Mystic Meg, because you’ll never guess what happened next. She got coronavirus. Pretty badly, actually, since you ask, around the end of March. While death is obviously the worst possible outcome of Covid-19, there are, it is increasingly clear, other bad ones. My sister is now suffering from long-term Covid, known to doctors like her as “post-acute Covid-19”. According to the British Medical Journal, about 10% of people who are infected still feel the effects more than three weeks later. In my sister’s case, it’s been six months. When she first got sick and tried to maintain that always-encouraged attitude – positivity – she would think ahead to the autumn, being back at work in the hospital, going for long cycle rides. Instead, she can’t walk to the end of her road without becoming breathless. It doesn’t improve. It just is.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/33ZYdlJ
