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In this paper’s Sunday Magazine about a week ago, there were two powerful stories about so-called long-haul Covid — a form of the disease that seems to leave certain patients permanently sick, creating a legacy of chronic illness that may be with us long after vaccines have consigned the pandemic’s acute phase to the past.
One was a first-person account by my colleague Laura Holson, detailing her nine months with the disease: the initial terrifying springtime surge of symptoms, and then the persistent ones — low fever, brain fogs, mild chest aches — that were punctuated, in her case, by a brief return of the more frightening ones, the crushing chest pain and racing pulse and gasps for air. Her story ends with sustained improvement, movement “in the right direction” as doctors like to say, but still a shadow of fatigue eight months after she got sick.