COVID-19 long haulers: Why are they still sick?

it's impossible to know how many are out there they can affect anyone at any age i see people that are really really fit and that are like operating at the highest level of human performance and the opposite it seems like the virus is like picking random people to impact all around the world there are people suffering from long covet a syndrome that seems to lead to long-lasting and in some cases new or permanent health conditions you see a lot of horror stories out there of people you know who are now unemployed you know other day i got a message from a patient she said i'm now homeless and it's it's heartbreaking and what is it about these random people what do they have in common i don't know yeah it's still a mystery to us everything takes way more time than it used to he's cutting hard cutting's not hard um but it's just standing you know the standing part is the problem this is how difficult katie maclean's life has become hi friends another day in the life of long coved today i went for my second emg testing which is nerve testing it just felt like i couldn't take a full breath in and my head felt like i didn't have enough air the 43 year old is a shell of her former self spending her days resting from her overwhelming fatigue headaches and general pain honestly i can't believe this is still happening 11 months later i can't do anything that i want to do anymore mclean is a long hauler a common term used to describe someone with long covet when i stand up my heart rate goes really really high so it'll go up to like 100 and you know 120 in the first 60 seconds that i'm standing we first met mclean last fall at her home in vancouver she had beaten covid but was still experiencing symptoms so when we sat with you a year ago you were suffering from long covet then yeah how are you feeling today not better after we last talked i was really gradually starting to have some improvements and then i had a very bad relapse in february of 2021 and that kind of brought me back to square one during mclean's relapse there was a period of time when she needed a wheelchair to get around in june she started improving but she still relies on a walker i was in so much pain i was so weak i really thought like this is it like i'm going to deteriorate until i'm gone i'm really happy that that didn't happen on one of our visits mclean ventured out the day marked her one-year follow-up appointment at st paul's hospital post coven 19 recovery clinic and she couldn't miss it i'm just going to sit down my heart rate just goes up so high it's like i'm running a racing heart rate is just one of the adverse symptoms associated with post-covet syndrome experts say there could be more than a hundred different side effects the symptom profile is very diverse and it can be anywhere from really headache predominant brain fog difficulties with their cognition their memory their their thinking all the way down to paresthesias numbness and tingling in their toes to chest pain dr jesse griner is the medical director of the clinic at st paul's he's also one of mclean's physicians are there a lot of people still long hauling after a year like me there are what do you attribute that to is it just this virus is just so detrimental i think the virus does something to the inner workings of the body in a way that we don't yet totally understand and it's really debilitating for patients it's it's honestly quite sad to watch in the patients that are like not having success in their road to recovery it's a tremendous burden that they still bear canada's public health agency says about 60 percent of those diagnosed with covid reported one or more symptoms three months after initial infection [Music] in atlanta 30 thrilled erica taylor has been shut in her home alone fighting her battle with long coven her most debilitating symptom brain fog i have difficulty sometimes focusing i have difficulty sometimes coming up with a word that i'm looking for sometimes i fail to recognize common objects like the time she forgot what her car looked like one time actually was getting into the car and halfway with my leg halfway in it suddenly didn't recognize my car and thought i was getting into somebody's else's car and it was very scary taylor's journey with covid started in june 2020 the non-profit lawyer tried to keep working but her brain was failing her when we met her a year ago she was forced to take a leave of absence take out dishes from dishwasher taylor is now back working from home despite not being a hundred percent to help her get through the day she has created a system of reminders on her phone even prompting her to brush her teeth i run a program every saturday where volunteer attorneys are paired up in interview with the clients every saturday i start off the same way i tell them that i have neurological issues that i'm forgetful i still have them come back and ask me questions like oh did you mean to send me this no no i didn't i'm sorry this was the one i meant to send you taylor's story is a scary one but part of an emerging pattern long-haulers often women now living with life-altering brain fog i want to show you what we're talking about and while the understanding of this syndrome is constantly evolving some studies have shown one in three covet sufferers may have had some type of neurological or psychiatric issue that means that it makes it the third most prevalent neurologic manifestation after tension type headache and migraine and ahead of stroke it's what dr igor karelnik and his team at northwestern medicine in chicago are looking into he oversees the nero cova 19 clinic and has seen hundreds of patients the major population coming to the clinic were younger they were previously never hospitalized but thereafter they developed persistent lingering and also debilitating neurologic symptoms including brain fog interestingly seventy percent of those patients were women while the evidence to suggest that it affects more women than men is not concrete karelnik has a theory that long covet is a form of autoimmune disease a condition where the immune system attacks its own body by mistake we know that women are more likely than men to develop autoimmune disease such as multiple sclerosis and so it is possible that there is a predisposition for this patient to develop the long-covet syndrome which may in fact be a manifestation of autoimmune diseases at washington university in st louis dr ziad al-ali is one of the leading authorities on long covet as a clinical epidemiologist he started to study the syndrome after reading personal stories about the plight of long haulers that was sort of the eye opening for me that oh you know something is happening here and really deserves to be investigated and really kudos to them they cut they actually even named the disease so al-ali and his colleagues went to work studying the records of more than 70 000 patients who got kovid 19 and what they found was alarming some developed serious chronic conditions that would probably need to be treated for the rest of their lives when we now talk about covet we talk about you know the toll of hospitalization and death that is really only the tip of the iceberg what we now know we know that covet 19 can cause or can lead to increased risk of new acid diabetes and also new onset kidney disease and and what we know about these diseases that they're really chronic diseases they don't go away to make matters worse everyone is at risk according to al ali regardless of whether a person's infection is mild or severe they are in danger of getting long covet meaning even those who never had symptoms could develop lifelong problems associated with the disease why this is important because these are the people who represent the majority of people who go with 19. most people with covert 19 don't need to be hospitalized most people go with 19 nurses at home and then they get better but in that group of people that is we found that it actually remains a significantly increased risk of long-term manifestation as for erica taylor she's seen many doctors even had a brain scan but she still doesn't have any answers i'm told to do brain puzzles i have so many brain puzzles now that i've downloaded and i do those every day it's been a long journey definitely a very long journey and with a whole bunch of trials and errors in a variety of ways so far taylor has persevered but remains fearful she'll never heal she's currently on a number of post-covet clinic waiting lists and hopes they'll be able to help her build upon the tiny improvements she's made over time i go through almost daily struggles because i i want to be who i was before you know i want to be able to react as quickly as i used to and be as on top of things as i was and it does make me sad but then i just continue to remind myself that okay this is who i am now and i just have to work with what i have on a brisk day in early october of this year ken borg heads to a hockey arena in rural ottawa [Music] the 60 year old is about to play in the opening game of the season and he's ecstatic i love hockey and this group of guys i play with are ideal everybody knows each other their names and a little bit of chirping back on and off and everyone plays at their own pace borg's ability to play the sport was put in jeopardy in march 2020. he was struck with a mysterious illness he was pretty sure it was coveted 19. it was probably the sickest i felt in my life it was very scary and why i call it one of the worst days of my life because i knew what it was you know it's all i could do without panicking just to keep breathing very shallow breaths and uh trying not to you know think too many bad things or or calling 911. because it was so early on in the pandemic borg never got tested but he had all the symptoms borg says he eventually got a covet 19 diagnosis from the doctor over the phone i had heart palpitations every day brain fog still had problems with my lungs covetous highest blood pressure i've ever recorded [Music] every day was difficult weeks went by and borg wasn't getting better he had to admit to himself he was a long hauler a condition that can affect those who've survived covet but are still suffering from its symptoms it varies from person to person i just couldn't do anything um that exerted my heart lifting some wood helping people out i would have the whole afternoon and evening with a concussion kind of hangover feeling for the rest of the day all i could do was lie down and you know it's horrible but in may 2021 after being sick for more than a year he got his first coven 19 vaccine shot and says he started to feel better i did notice after the vaccine a lot of things improved so i was very curious hockey how would it be i had this huge like dangerous heart rates a year ago playing hockey so i'm really hoping for some improvement there's a small number of patients that feel like the vaccine has cured them of their illness although that's not persistent in all cases either dr jesse griner has been treating and studying patients at the postcovid19 recovery clinic at st paul's hospital in vancouver we have spoken to some patients who say as soon as they did get the vaccine their long coveted symptoms went away is there some legitimacy to that yeah it's difficult to say because we still there's still so much that we don't understand about how long covet works it's possible that there's a psychological impact what is the potential risk of fully vaccinated people who get the virus ending up with long covered it's a little bit too early to know the answer to that question there was recently a report published out of the uk that suggested that patients that had breakthrough cases that were previously vaccinated were potentially at a 50 reduction in the risk of developing long covert so that has me optimistic that actually our vaccine rollout will curb the amount of long covet that we see in this province at the arena borg is putting his ticker to the test it's the first time hitting the ice with his league since being in recovery mode and he wants to see if his body can handle it to track his improvement borg is wearing a heart monitor it didn't take long before he had to bench himself borg's legs were fine but his heart was giving him trouble i did carry the puck in you know set something up and had a bit of fun and when i looked at my watch it was 165 and so 165 beats per minute which is above the danger zone for for me being 60 years old after almost an hour the game was complete made it the league doesn't keep score but borg tallied up his progress so i've been checking it every shift and it's dramatic you know it goes up to 150 when i play defense and normally i'm a forward so i've just been taking it really really easy and it's still getting very high it seems borg still has a little way to go to get back to his pre-covet form but he is encouraged by the fact that he is stronger than before i'm building up strength i'm walking farther i was taking naps every day for the last year and a half i've moved off that i'd like to know why i have this crazy high heart rate but i'm hoping i will see some improvements over time i'm so exhausted today for more than a year katie mclean has been in and out of the hospital trying to get answers but doctors still don't know why she isn't getting better on your chest three one two three the once healthy and avid walker has been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome which affects blood flow both conditions may have been triggered by the virus for me to try and do a normal activity there's a price to pay so my body doesn't have the energy to do activities of daily living one explanation for what's causing long covet is t cells in the body which normally go from cell to cell to find those infected and destroy them are reacting differently against the coronavirus and experts don't know why there is a growing body of evidence showing reduced t cell counts in hospitalized covate patients with severe pneumonia at this point we can say that the response of the t cell from the lung holders is strikingly different from the one who are the covid convalescent we don't have any lingering symptoms in the lab dr igor koralnik has been actively pursuing this hypothesis and the emerging picture that we get from this study is consistent with an ongoing persistent low-level infection with the virus in the lung haulers which we are currently investigating but without any definitive answers mclean is left to manage her symptoms mostly on her own so this is my supplement cupboard she takes a handful of supplements every day and sees a physiotherapist it's affected every aspect of her life what's the toll been like on your partner well it's been difficult because really she had to care for me full time for many many months and do everything we definitely have had some rough times but i think it's made us stronger to just get through all this adversity together sorry mclean is trying to turn adversity into strength hoping that one day she'll be rid of the sickness and walk away from her life as a long hauler the doctor believes that long haulers are going to get better yeah do you believe that i have to believe that because otherwise i think i would feel a lot of despair and depression on top of the other you know pain and difficulties that i'm dealing with so i do try and remain optimistic about it

Channel: Global News

Views: 225,697

Keywords: global news, the new reality, covid long haulers, coronavirus, COVID-19, corona virus, coronavirus update, coronavirus news, coronavirus latest news, coronavirus outbreak, corona virus update, coronavirus pandemic, coronavirus headlines, coronavirus today, vaccine for covid 19, vaccine news, vaccine rollout, robin gill, brain fog, Long COVID, COVID long hauler, Long hauler, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, treatment

Id: AKUavgRA0QE

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021