Long COVID presents ‘unfathomable’ burden as health-care system reaches ‘boiling point’

globalnews.ca:

COVID-19 infection was just “average.” She recovered in a matter of days and went back to work.Several weeks later she was incapacitated.“I woke up completely disabled, profoundly ill (and) completely changed from my previous self,” the Toronto emergency room doctor said.The avid runner was now bedbound. She had difficulties focusing – barely able to remember her address.“I wasn’t able to parent my child.

I couldn’t do very basic things with him, (having severe) sensitivity to sound and noise,” she said.“You can imagine how that affects your relationships.”She caught COVID-19 in April 2022 and is still suffering from long COVID.A new paper warns the condition, which affects millions of people globally, presents a burden to patients, health-care providers, governments and economies that is “unfathomable.”The report, called “The Immunology of long COVID” and published by the science journal Nature on July 11, draws on other peer-reviewed articles to state the disease is “multi-organ (and) multisystem,” that even infections without symptoms can cause organ damage, that there is evidence it causes micro blood clots and that SARS-CoV-2, the that which causes COVID-19, can remain in a person’s body.And besides the perhaps best-known symptoms like fatigue and brain fog, long COVID also appears to increase the risk of stroke, heart attacks and diabetes types 1 and 2.“(Long COVID) really is very complex and very heterogeneous and very challenging,” the paper’s lead author Danny Altmann told Global News.And this virus, he said, “seems to do more and more … ghastly things.”Altmann is a professor of immunology at Imperial College London in London, U.K.Canada, the U.K. and the World Health Organization, along with many other