Published by: The Washington Post
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By Richard Sima
In March 2020, Hannah Davis fell ill, and everything changed. Her respiratory symptoms were mild, but the neurological and cognitive fallout was frightening.
“I could tell very early on that something was wrong with my brain,” she said after getting sick with covid-19.
And Davis had quantitative proof — her score for processing speed on a cognitive test dropped from the 96th percentile right before the pandemic to the 14th percentile after her coronavirus infection.
Comments closedPublished by: BBC News
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By Michela Riva, Jordan Davies
Young people living with debilitating symptoms caused by long Covid have described feeling abandoned and having to “battle” to access NHS support.
Kaylee, 17, a once promising gymnast who hoped to represent her country, developed the virus on her 12th birthday and still experiences symptoms including dizziness and shortness of breath, causing her to miss school and give up on the sport she loves.
Two million people in the UK have long Covid, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Comments closedPublished by: Le Journal de Montréal
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By Erika Aubin
Struck down by long COVID for the past year, a great athlete and CEGEP student remains hopeful even if he has to spend his days lying down doing nothing, because the slightest effort completely exhausts him.
“Deep down, I think I’ll heal completely, but it’s going to take time. I trust science,” says Ludovic Bégin, with a weak voice on the other end of the line.
Comments closedPublished by: Radio-Canada
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By Émile Lapointe
Five years after COVID-19 disrupted the daily lives of many people in the country, some are still dealing with the lingering after-effects of this virus, whose symptoms are most often similar to those of the flu and fade after a few days. For Marie-Noëlle Claveau, the effects of long COVID persist, years later.
The singing professor and coordinator of the music program at Collège d’Alma has been dealing with the consequences of this disease since November 2023. Since then, she has been on sick leave and is being monitored at the long COVID clinic at the Jonquière Hospital.
“Let’s just say that the years 2023 and 2024 were quite difficult, but I can say that progress continues to be made slowly but surely,” says Marie-Noëlle Claveau.
Comments closedPublished by: Montreal Gazette
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By Jesse Feith
Roxanne Major was working as an auxiliary nurse in a seniors’ residence two years ago when a COVID-19 outbreak spread through the home, infecting staff and residents.
Asked to replace a colleague who fell ill, Major took extra precautions. She disinfected her medication cart three times and wore a mask, full gown, gloves and protective glasses.
Despite her efforts, Major soon tested positive herself. Following a brief attempt to return to work the next week — the dizziness and exhaustion were too much — she was granted 10 days off to recover.
Two years later, Major, 40, has yet to return to the job she loved for 19 years. As she said in a recent interview, “everything went upside down.”
Comments closedPublished by: CBC News
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By Leah Hendry
When Nathanael Rafinejad first moved to Montreal, they loved the city’s nightlife and worked as a bartender and a waiter while studying business management.
But after catching COVID-19 in January 2022, the 29-year-old is now mostly confined to their apartment.
“I feel completely cut off from the world most of the time,” said Rafinejad. “I can’t walk anymore. I cannot stand for more than a few seconds at a time. I can’t sit for a long time. I have to use a wheelchair every day.”
Comments closedPublished by: La Presse
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By Rima Elkouri
To illustrate her long journey through long COVID, Dr. Anne Bhéreur shows me a photo sent to her by her friend Julie Pinard, who also suffers from a severe form of the disease. It shows the ice of the river at Kamouraska, sparkling in a thousand pieces under a winter sun. In the distance, fog. On the other bank, Mont des Éboulements.
The photo captures what Dr. Bhéreur has been going through since she was infected with COVID-19. It was in December 2020, following an outbreak in the palliative care setting where she worked. The doctor, a mother in her forties with no medical history and boundless energy, was convinced that she would return to her old life after 10 days. More than four years later, while she is still living with serious after-effects of the disease, she is beginning to come to terms with the idea that this life may not come back.
Comments closedPublished by: The Guardian / The Observer
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By Kathryn Bromwich
Five years on from March 2020, millions of people still face debilitating symptoms, with huge repercussions on public health and productivity. But politicians are starting to pretend the pandemic never happened
On 20 March 2020, Rowan Brown started to feel a tickle at the back of her throat. Over the next few days, new symptoms began to emerge: difficulty breathing, some tiredness. By the following week, the UK had been put under lockdown in a last-minute attempt to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19. No one else she knew had yet been infected, so she posted updates on Facebook to keep people informed: “Oh, guys, it feels like a mild flu. Tonsillitis was definitely worse.”
Brown didn’t know then she was at the beginning of a condition that did not yet have a name, but which has since become known as long Covid. After two weeks, she had a Zoom with a friend, and at the end of the conversation it was as if all life force had drained out of her body. Her doctor advised her to stay in bed for two weeks. Those two weeks turned into three and a half months of extended Covid symptoms: nausea, fevers, night sweats, intense muscle and joint pain, allodynia (a heightened sensitivity to pain), hallucinations, visual disturbances. By the end of the three months, she had noted 32 different symptoms. “I didn’t recognise the way my body felt at all: my skin, my hair,” she remembers now. “It was like being taken over by a weird alien virus, which I guess is what happened.”
Comments closedPublished by: The Denver Post
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By Jessica Seaman
Lilly Downs rolled out of bed in her new apartment and began setting up her morning’s IV fluids, which flow from a tube in her chest into her bloodstream to keep the 20-year-old hydrated.
Next, she crushed and dissolved pills so they could run through a separate tube into her intestines, which absorb the medicine better than her stomach.
The steps Lilly took that October morning are necessary because her stomach stopped working properly following her first bout with COVID-19 four years ago. But her routine also served another purpose: It was content she filmed for a video that she later posted on TikTok, where she has amassed nearly 470,000 followers.
Comments closedPublished by: CTV News / Reuters
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By Jennifer Rigby, Julie Steenhuysen
There are certain phrases that Wachuka Gichohi finds difficult to hear after enduring four years of living with long COVID, marked by debilitating fatigue, pain,…
Comments closedPublished by: Time
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By Alana Kaufman
It started when my brain gave out on me in algebra class one January day in 2022. I couldn’t figure out a simple math problem; all I saw were numbers and symbols. My eyelids drooped, my head hurt, I could barely stay awake. Something wasn’t right.
I hadn’t felt like myself since getting COVID-19 a couple weeks earlier. Simple tasks like reading a text or standing up were draining. But what happened in that classroom scared me. At age 14, my life became a state of constant exhaustion, punctuated by doctors’ visits that, months later, would lead to a Long COVID diagnosis. Still, in those early weeks, I felt determined. I was a high-achieving student athlete always eager to accept a challenge—and I felt confident that I could get past whatever this was quickly.
Comments closedPublished by: Global News
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By Destiny Meilleur
The COVID-19 pandemic is a thought of the past for many people, but for others, COVID forever altered their lives.
And in the province of Saskatchewan, there have been very limited resources available to these people.
“It’s a complete upturn of the way you live, the way you view yourself, the way you view mortality, for sure,” said Hunter Reavley.
For Reavley, she held many dreams for her future before she got COVID-19 and the infection changed her life, but not for the better.
Comments closedPublished by: The London Free Press
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By Beatriz Baleeiro
Haunted for more than a year by phantom smells she couldn’t explain, Rebecca Bruzzese said she worried about her safety and mental health.
She could smell burning cigarettes in her living room, but no one was smoking. Beef frying on the stove smelled like “excrement in a pan.” Coffee was even worse.
“It smelled like hot garbage,” the 32-year-old said.
Unable to eat, Bruzzese lost 30 pounds and developed other health problems.
Comments closedPublished by: Salon
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By Nicole Karlis
In January 2022, Jennifer Robertson’s now 11-year-old son, Fergus, developed long COVID, a condition in which the symptoms of COVID-19 linger for months or even years. Due to his symptoms, he missed nearly six weeks of school after his first infection. He’d be in and out of the classroom for the rest of the school year.
Robertson never knew how her son would feel day to day. After three months of daily fever spikes, red eyes, and chest pains, the family pulled him out of their school to be homeschooled for a year. There was hope when he returned to in-person school last year at a private, and more flexible, school.
Comments closedPublished by: CBC News
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By Kate Rutherford
Along with an increase in colds and the flu across northern Ontario this fall; pharmacies are seeing a bump in people searching, unsuccessfully, for rapid antigen COVID-19 tests to take at home.
In Sudbury, Ont., Lucio Fabris was one of them.
He recently went on the hunt for a test for his wife who had been exposed to COVID-19.
They were expecting a grandchild and they didn’t want to spread the virus to vulnerable family members.
Comments closedPublished by: People
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By Charna Flam
Sérgio Mendes, the Brazilian-born musician who brought bossa nova music to a global audience in the 1960s, died on Thursday, Sept. 5, in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 83.
The renowned musician’s family announced his death in a statement on his social media channels. His family said that his death was caused by effects of long Covid.
“His wife and musical partner for the past 54 years, Gracinha Leporace Mendes, was by his side, as were his loving children,” the statement read. “Mendes last performed in November 2023 to sold out and wildly enthusiastic houses in Paris, London and Barcelona.”
Comments closedPublished by: CBC News
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By Kendra Seguin
A London program that has been credited with helping patients with long COVID get treatment and support is shutting down because the province has not renewed its funding.
The Post-Acute COVID-19 Program at Parkwood will shut down by the end of the year and has stopped taking patients as of this month, St. Joseph’s Health Care London confirmed in a statement.
The shutdown leaves Londoners who have long COVID without a dedicated space to get treatment.
Published by: USA Today
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By Adrianna Rodriguez
Rose Lehane Tureen is one busy teenager.
The 16-year-old is class president, an Irish step dance champion, singer, cross-country runner and straight-A student at her high school in Maine.
Her accomplishments belie the reality that she suffers from a debilitating headache that has lasted for more than four years, one of the several long COVID symptoms she’s endured since an infection in March 2020.
At the beginning of her illness, Rose went to the emergency room half a dozen times and was hospitalized twice with dizziness and blinding head pain. She also had red and swollen fingers, toes and ears; peeling skin; joint pain; problems controlling her temperature and terrible dreams.
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