COVID ‘long haulers’ suffer effects from the virus months after recovering

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    NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WFSB) — As the months drag on with the coronavirus pandemic, doctors are seeing more and more so-called “long haulers.”

These are people who have had COVID-19, but still have health problems months after recovering from the virus.

Steve Adkins and his wife Rita were among the first people in Connecticut to be diagnosed with COVID-19. They live in Clinton and believe the got it from attending an outdoor concert in Madison in early March.

“There was guy on the other side of the table, my back was to him, with a pretty bad cough. Coughing in my direction,” Adkins said.

Rita wound up sick too, but her symptoms were not severe and didn’t require hospitalizations.

Steve spent two weeks at Yale New Haven Hospital and wasn’t sure if he would live to see his wife again.

“We hadn’t really said goodbye. We hadn’t had that last kiss, we hadn’t hugged. That was hard. One of my big reliefs was that I didn’t give it to anybody else,” Steve said.

Now, seven months later, relief is replaced with frustration about a new concern; the long-term effects of COVID-19.

Steve is a long hauler. He recovered from the virus, but now, has long-term complications.

Something that surprised him since at 67-years-old, he’s never had health problems or even been on medication and has always been healthy and an active boater and cycler.

“I’m like wow, I’m light. I’m on the bike, I’m exercising, I’m getting some decent mileage, just felt like I was a poster child for recovery. And then it was just more recently, in late August, I woke up one morning and I had double vision,” Steve said.

Steve was then diagnosed with AFIB, an irregular heartbeat that increases your risk of heart failure and stroke. There is no true cure, but it can be controlled with medicine.

“I feel betrayed because we knew, or somebody knew this was a bad illness in March and we weren’t led to believe it was a bad illness. That concert wouldn’t have happened if we had been as alarmed as we should have been in January or December,” Steve said.

Rita too has never had health problems and yet, she has lasting effects from the coronavirus.

“I have chronic fatigue, where I’ll get up in the morning at nine o’clock and at eleven o’clock, I’ll tell him I’m just really tired and I’ll lie down and sleep for four hours. It just overwhelms me. Sometimes I’m driving and I have to pull over to the side of the road because I’m nodding off, so that’s my big thing and headaches,” Rita said.

Rita and Steve are not alone. There are growing numbers of COVID long haulers.

There are now countless online communities of long haulers complaining of brain fog, lack of concentration, fatigue, and many other problems.

“I think we need to learn a lot more about the long term consequences of COVID, but what we begin to see through some of these groups is that 20 to maybe as many as 50 percent of people will have some kind of persistent problem after hospitalization with COVID,” said Dr. Mitchell Elkind.

Dr. Mitchell Elkind is the President of the American Heart Association. He says people are more likely to have long term heart, lung, or neurological problems if they were hospitalized with COVID, but even if people aren’t hospitalized, they can still have them.

“There are some people who had mild symptoms, were never hospitalized, who seem to have some evidence of heart injury, for example, even a few months after the virus. And some people will have some other what we could generally call neurological complaints. Fatigue, headaches, muscle aches and pains, and things of that sort,” Dr. Elkind said.

Dr. Elkind says preexisting conditions put people at higher risk, but even healthy people can become a long hauler.

“It’s absolutely incorrect to think that this virus does not affect young people, healthy people, we are all at risk from this virus. It’s true that certain cardiovascular conditions as well as age increases the risk of complications, but young healthy people have gotten very ill, have had stroke, I’ve seen them. Some have died from this virus, thankfully that’s rate, but it does happen. We are all at risk,” Dr. Elkind said.

For Steve and Rita, they try to remain positive about their new normal and focus on what’s good in their life.

“What’s more important is family and the grand babies and having fun. So, I’ll stick to that route a little more and try not to let the things that get you down, get you down,” Steve said.

But not down and out from a virus that for many survivors is like an unwelcome house guest who won’t pack up and leave.

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