Press "Enter" to skip to content

Tag: long COVID

Video | Four years in, Dr. Raj Bhardwaj discusses how far we’ve come in Canada since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in 2020

CBC Calgary’s weekly health columnist, Dr. Raj Bhardwaj, discusses what we’ve learned and how far we’ve come with science and treatments since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Comments closed

Four years on: the career costs for scientists battling long COVID

Abby Koppes got COVID-19 in March 2020, just as the world was waking up to the unprecedented scale on which the virus was spreading. Her symptoms weren’t bad at first. She spent the early lockdown period in Boston, Massachusetts, preparing her tenure application.

During that summer of frenzied writing, Koppes’s symptoms worsened. She often awoke in the night with her heart racing. She was constantly gripped by fatigue, but she brushed off the symptoms as due to work stress. “You gaslight yourself a little bit, I guess,” she says.

Soon after Koppes submitted her tenure application in July, she began experiencing migraines for the first time, which left her bedridden. Her face felt as if it was on fire, a condition called trigeminal neuralgia that’s also known as suicide disease because of the debilitating pain it causes. Specialists took months to diagnose her with a series of grim-sounding disorders: Sjögren’s syndrome, small-fibre polyneuropathy and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. To make time for the litany of doctors’ appointments, Koppes took a six-month “self-care sabbatical.”

Comments closed

The World’s Moved On From Covid. Some Of Us Can’t

There is still no help for most of us, largely owing to the fact that there is not a test for Long Covid, or even established diagnostic criteria. Without that, it’s impossible to claim disability assistance unless you happen to have a qualifying secondary diagnosis.

Comments closed

Video | International Long COVID Awareness Day

Friday was International Long COVID Awareness Day. The condition affects about 11 per cent of Canadians who get it. More than two hundred symptoms have been connected to long COVID, with shortness of breath and brain fog being the most common.

The symptoms of COVID can last for months and for most, they will subside. But there are many people who don’t recover or remain symptomatic.

A McMaster professor and long COVID researcher says she experienced symptoms for 18 months before recovering and the scariest part for her was the brain fog.

Comments closed

Canadians with long COVID are struggling with myriad symptoms and patchwork treatments

A year ago, Sandy Choiniere was so weak from long COVID, she couldn’t hold her 20-month-old daughter in her arms while standing.

Today, she feels functional, but only because she’s being careful, listening to her body and resting when she needs to. “I sometimes still feel like a 35-year-old woman in the body of a 70-year-old lady,” she says. “Sometimes I have to cancel plans I have with friends because I am too tired,” something that has been hard to accept.

Ms. Choiniere is one of the Canadians who shared their stories of long COVID with The Globe and Mail in 2023. Twelve months later, we followed up to see how they’re doing.

Comments closed

Video | Patients, advocates come to Washington for Long Covid Awareness Day

On Friday, dozens of people went to our nation’s capital to demand more action be taken to address long Covid. Patients, advocates, and activists demonstrated in front of the Lincoln Memorial for the first Long Covid Awareness Day.

“When you become a nurse, you swear to a code of ethics. This code is why I’m standing here today,” said Dara York who organized the rally.

York is a nurse and mother of three from California who is battling long Covid. She and others called on Congress and President Biden to provide more resources for prevention, research and treatment.

Comments closed

‘Alarming’ rise in Americans with long Covid symptoms

Some 6.8% of American adults are currently experiencing long Covid symptoms, according to a new survey from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), revealing an “alarming” increase in recent months even as the health agency relaxes Covid isolation recommendations, experts say.

That means an estimated 17.6 million Americans could now be living with long Covid.

“This should be setting off alarms for many people,” said David Putrino, the Nash Family Director of the Cohen Center for Recovery From Complex Chronic Illness at Mount Sinai. “We’re really starting to see issues emerging faster than I expected.”

Comments closed

Long COVID Patients Say WorkSafeBC Is Making Life Worse

Maryanne Andrew has been getting sicker and sicker since she caught COVID-19 in January 2022 while working in a Campbell River school.

And instead of helping, she says, WorkSafeBC’s attempts to require her to go back to work have made her symptoms worse.

Andrew is among more than two million Canadians still suffering from long-term COVID symptoms as of last summer, according to a Statistics Canada survey, which also found about half of the patients reported not seeing any improvements in their condition over time.

Comments closed

We ignored AIDS. Let’s not repeat the mistake on long COVID | Editorial

In the earliest days of the AIDS crisis, America ignored the problem, even though people were dropping dead by the thousands.

We’re repeating the mistake now with long COVID. Millions are suffering, but the government has largely turned its back, as new cases emerge with each passing wave.

So people are coming from all over the country this week to Washington D.C., in the footsteps of AIDS activists, to protest at the Lincoln Memorial on March 15th. They’re desperate for their stories to be heard.

Comments closed

Radio | Quatre ans avec la COVID longue, le témoignage d’une famille montréalaise

Three years after the WHO declared the pandemic, this report plunges into the heart of the upset daily life of a Montreal family affected by…

Comments closed

COVID is not done and gone, nor is it particular

On Dec. 27, 2023, I spent the afternoon playing mahjong. That was to be the last day I was able to hear the pleasing click-clacking sound of those plastic tiles as they are tumbled and mixed on the table.

I came home from my mahjong game that afternoon and reported to my husband that I had a sore throat. Darn, the start of another cold. That turned into a very bad cold, with an incessantly runny nose, sneezing and congestion. As I talked on the phone with my sister on my way to run errands, she urged me to take a COVID test. I could not understand why, since I had no cough, no loss of taste or smell, no shortness of breath. But I acquiesced to her wisdom — though not before I finished shopping the many aisles of Target, unknowingly spreading the virus to my fellow shoppers. Sure enough, the COVID test was positive. That was the beginning of the end — the end of me being able to hear the mahjong tiles, the delighted squeals of my grandson and the high-pitched tweets of the songbirds returning for spring.

Comments closed

Four years later, long COVID continues to upend lives in Quebec

Sylvie Gagnon has been struggling with the symptoms of long COVID since early 2023, when she caught the virus for a fourth time since the outset of the pandemic.

A business development manager, Gagnon has been off work ever since. Needing help with daily tasks, she’s had to move in with her son and daughter-in-law.

On the few days she manages to leave the house in Vaudreuil-Dorion, she wears sunglasses and earmuffs — the condition has played havoc with her senses, leaving her hypersensitive to light and noise. Her pressure spikes without warning. Any exercise causes extreme fatigue.

Comments closed

Living With Long COVID: ‘You Feel Like You Have Been Poisoned’

“The sensation often felt akin to being poisoned.”

Katherine Francis, 30, has been living with long COVID for three and a half years. “I was originally infected in October 2020, just a week before starting a new job in PR,” Francis told Newsweek. “Three and a half years later, much of my life is still largely confined to the four walls of my home, with occasional outings to various hospital appointments.”

“I’ve been diagnosed with Inappropriate Sinus Tachycardia, Dysautonomia, asthma and lung scarring to name a few, all attributed to Long COVID.”

Long COVID can affect anyone, irrespective of the severity of their initial infection. At least 65 million individuals have been affected by this chronic post-viral condition worldwide, a study published in the journal Nature Reviews Microbiology in January 2023 reports, equating to roughly 1 in 10 individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Comments closed

Study of 1 million US kids shows vaccines tied to lower risk of long COVID

A study of 1,037,936 US children seen in 17 healthcare systems across the country shows that COVID-19 vaccines are moderately protective against long COVID: 35% to 45%, with higher rates in adolescents. The study was published today in Pediatrics.

The researchers estimated vaccine effectiveness (VE) against long COVID in children aged 5 to 17 years. Though severe COVID-19 cases are less common in children than in adults, persistent symptoms in children do occur.

“It is difficult to establish how much this results from differential reporting of symptoms at different ages, greater difficulty distinguishing long COVID from other childhood illnesses or effects of the pandemic (eg, disruption of seasonal viral patterns, or of school progress,” the authors wrote.

Comments closed

Covid Became a Pandemic 4 Years Ago. How Does Your Life Look Now?

We want to hear from readers on how your life has or hasn’t changed.

Monday marks four years since the World Health Organization declared Covid a pandemic. Since then, millions of people around the world have died from the virus, and today, the persistent impact of long Covid is being studied and the latest variant to become dominant, JN.1, continues to spread in the United States.

Though the W.H.O. dropped its global health emergency designation in May 2023, life for many people continues to look very different now than it did before March 2020, when most of the world first went into lockdown to try to halt the virus’s spread.

We want to hear from you about your life. Do any new considerations shape your daily routine, or your decisions regarding friends and family? Has Covid changed your overall outlook?

Comments closed

Radio | New report fails to address Covid impacts for children

  • A Public Health Agency investigation into the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on children’s health is facing criticism, as it does not address how Covid infections directly affected children and their families.
  • Instead, the Swedish Covid Association says attention in the report has been focused on how school closures and other restrictions affected children’s well-being.
  • Social Affairs and Public Health Minister Jakob Forssmed tells Swedish Radio News there are valid reasons for having a wide-ranging investigation.
Comments closed

Des déclins cognitifs constatés après une infection à la COVID-19

Scientific evidence about the long-term effects of COVID-19 continues to accumulate. Two new studies involving hundreds of thousands of people suggest that SARS-CoV-2 infections can cause cognitive decline.

Researchers at Imperial College, London recruited nearly 113,000 Britons previously infected with the COVID-19 virus for their study. These individuals engaged in various cognitive exercises to assess their memory and their faculties of concentration and attention. Their results were compared to those of people never infected.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, show that the coronavirus is believed to impair cognitive abilities and the intelligence quotient (IQ).

Comments closed

Even healthcare workers face difficulty accessing long-COVID care, review suggests

Healthcare workers (HCWs) with long-COVID symptoms reported that their physicians shrugged off their concerns and that they struggled to get the care they needed, a new systematic review suggests.

For the rapid review, published yesterday in PLOS One, researchers from the University of Aberdeen and Robert Gordon University in Scotland reviewed 30 studies published from December 2019 to December 2022 to evaluate the effects of long COVID on HCW health, working life, personal circumstances, and use of healthcare resources. Two of the studies provided qualitative evidence, and 28 survey studies offered quantitative evidence.

Comments closed