[Translated from French]

My daughter has been living with COVID for almost two years. She suffers day after day, without access to proper treatment. She endures overwhelming fatigue, brain fog, severe insomnia, trigeminal neuralgia and a disorder of the autonomic nervous system where her heart accelerates abnormally when she stands, causing dizziness, intense fatigue and faintness. She spends almost 20 hours a day in bed. Her husband has had to stop working to take care of her and their two children. I can’t stand by and watch her suffer.

This is not an isolated case: this suffering, sometimes present for six years, is still ignored by our health system, even though the existence of long COVID is firmly established by science.

Yet the data are unequivocal:

• In 2023, 2.1 million adults in Canada were still living with persistent symptoms (PHAC and Statistics Canada);;
• Among health care workers, 6% were still experiencing symptoms in the summer of 2023, representing about 24,000 people in Quebec (INSPQ, 2023);
• 6 million children in the United States have long COVID, and the researcher Malgorzata Gasperowicz estimates that about 584,000 children and adolescents could be affected in Canada (Gross et al., 2025; M. Gasperowicz).

Long COVID is a silent shockwave that is sweeping through Quebec. It is hitting our families, schools, hospitals and our economy. Specialist clinics have been closed or reduced in size, and the $20.5 million announced in 2022, initially intended for research, has been entirely reallocated. Since then, no new funding has been granted to develop treatments.