Will vaccines protect us from long-haul Covid ? We need answers Fiona Lowenstein © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AFP/Getty Images
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, members of disability and chronic illness communities have warned that Covid-19 could be a mass-disabling event. Yet media stories and policy decisions have continued to focus on hospitalizations and deaths, largely ignoring “long Covid” – the patient-preferred term for the long-term symptoms that some patients have experienced following what can begin as a mild Covid infection. Pharmaceutical companies, health agencies and governments are confident that vaccines can decrease hospitalization and death rates, eventually ending the pandemic. But few are discussing long Covid within the context of vaccines or the pandemic’s resolution. Those of us who have experienced the long-term symptoms of Covid-19 find ourselves erased from the narrative once again, and wonderi
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Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency room doctor in New York City, was no stranger to dangerous viruses when a brush with one landed him in Bellevue Hospital for 19 days. But it was only after he was discharged, and declared virus-free, that the really bizarre symptoms set in.
Back at home, he noticed he couldn’t taste anything for several days. For months, he was tired all the time and his joints felt heavy and painful. When he woke up in the morning, his back was “stiff like a bamboo rod.” His weight dropped, and clumps of hair fell out. Though the physical effects eventually faded, cognitive complications persist to this day what he describes as “a subtle but noticeable difference in concentration and ability to form new memories.”