I might have had long Covid for almost a year and a half after I was sick with what might have been Covid, early in 2020. I was on my way to be tested, and got a flat tire, didn't feel up to dealing with it while I was sick, and didn't want to spread whatever I had. It finally cleared up after I had my first two vaccinations. Fortunately, it wasn't as bad as some people, but it would have been a big problem if I had had a job. Every few days I would have one or several days of extreme fatigue, have to sleep 12 hours, then also take a two hour nap. Didn't feel so great on the good days, either.
January 11, 2022
Frank Diamond
Sometimes lost among the evidence that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 might be a way to, ironically, end the pandemic–mild symptoms and high infectivity might get us to herd immunity—is this question: What about long COVID? That’s especially pertinent to infection preventionists (IPs) and other health care professionals who find themselves yet again on the frontlines of another surge.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), long COVID “is a range of symptoms that can last weeks or months after first being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 or can appear weeks after infection. Long COVID can happen to anyone who has had COVID-19, even if their illness was mild, or if they had no symptoms.”
Linda Spaulding, RN-BC, CIC, CHEC, CHOP, a member of Infection Control Today®’s Editorial Advisory Board (EAB), says that she’s “seen athletes in their 20s on the wait list for double lung transplants because of long COVID. That’s something that has long-term consequences. Some people talk of COVID fog. They just can’t put their thoughts together.”
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A preprint study by Oxford University investigators on the medRxiv website, compares brain scans for SARS-CoV-2 infections in 394 COVID-19 patients who tested positive for the infection against 388 patients in a control group. “We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula,” the study states. “When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole.”
As noted by Kevin Kavanagh, MD, another member of ICT®’s EAB, a core difficulty in society’s attempt to guide COVID-19 from pandemic to endemic is that COVID is not just a respiratory virus. Kavanagh wrote in October that SARS-CoV-2 is similar to HIV because it can “silently spread throughout the host’s body and attack almost every organ.”
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Bruce Patterson, MD, who works for the Chronic COVID Treatment Center, says it is too soon to determine whether Omicron can cause long COVID, but believes it will follow the same route as Delta in that regard. He tells the Deseret News in Utah that “I mean, given what we’ve heard and what we’ve seen, and Omicron just infecting everybody under the sun, we’ll see the same thing with an abundance of kids and adults.”
Kavanagh writes for ICT® that “much of the abandonment of public health measures has been spurred by a massive disinformation campaign which has successfully convinced a relatively large portion of our population that as long as one lives through COVID-19 all will be well. The young and healthy have especially embraced this narrative.”
It is a false narrative, Kavanagh warns, because “the premise that mild infections do not carry significant risks is false. In part this belief is driven by those who have not died from COVID-19 being counted as ‘recovered’ as opposed to ‘survived’. SARS-CoV-2 causes a system infection and is commonly detected in the heart and brain, exemplified by the loss of smell from brain tissue destruction and loss of cardiac function from myocarditis. Even those who develop ‘mild’ COVID-19 can develop long COVID-19 which in many cases lasts for a year or longer.”
Everybody but everybody hopes that this pandemic will end, but experts like Kavanagh point out there’s a difference between hoping and wishful thinking. In terms of evolutionary survival, viruses have billions of years of a head start on humans. And just as the world focuses less on Delta and more on Omicron, yet another variant has been spotted.
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