Long COVID After COVID

Aashish Mishra

Touch wood, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be on its way out. On Thursday (February 16, 2023), Nepal detected four new cases of the disease in 24 hours. This is a significant drop – 99 per cent to be exact – from the numbers we saw only a year ago. On the same day last year, the country recorded 639 cases of the novel coronavirus in 24 hours.

Although the past three years have taught us that we can never say never with the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus and as of Thursday, the number of active cases in Nepal was still in double digits, we can at least take an (unmasked) breath of relief for now knowing that the spread of the contagion remains limited and the deaths have stopped.

For around two years, COVID ravaged Nepal at a scale no disease has in living memory. At the height of the Delta-variant-driven second wave of the pandemic, nearly 50 per cent of all samples collected were testing positive. A total of 1,153,357 people have contracted the disease at some point since the start of the coronavirus outbreak in the country to Thursday, as of the data released by the Ministry of Health and Population. 

This means that nearly four per cent of our nation’s population experience health problems related to COVID-19 and got themselves tested. And this means that over a million Nepalis now stand at risk of post-COVID-19 syndrome or long COVID.

In simple words, long COVID is the health problem people experience after they have recovered from COVID proper. 

These are conditions that persist for a long time after the person has tested negative for the coronavirus. These conditions manifest in the form of many new, returning or ongoing symptoms that patients experience more than four weeks after their recovery from COVID. 

These symptoms, which include fatigue, fever, shortness of breath, persistent cough, joint and muscle pain, chest pain, irregular heartbeat, diarrhoea, blood clots, vascular issues, mental conditions like difficulty concentrating, headache, irregular sleep patterns, dizziness and anxiety and changes to menstrual cycles, then may last months or years.

Medical studies in western countries have shown that one in five people aged 18 to 64 experiences at least one symptom of long COVID between one month and one year of their recovery from COVID-19. For people older than 64, that number rises to one in four. 

People who became seriously ill when they had COVID, so much so that they needed to be hospitalised and/or placed in the intensive care unit are at a higher risk of developing long COVID and so are people who had pre-existing chronic medical conditions and those who saw issues with their internal organs and tissues when sick with the coronavirus. Adults are also more prone to developing long COVID than children or adolescents. 

Nevertheless, doctors caution that anyone who gets COVID can get long COVID, including people who did not report any symptoms or were not made very sick by the coronavirus when they initially tested positive.

However, it must be mentioned that long COVID remains an enigma and much more research is needed before we can even begin to say anything conclusive about this syndrome. The symptoms, too, are non-definitive and can be brought about by many things including general overload and exhaustion. It is also not clear if long COVID is induced by COVID. 

According to the US-based non-profit Mayo Clinic, some of the symptoms of the post-COVID-19 syndrome are similar to the problems caused by chronic fatigue syndrome (extreme fatigue that worsens with physical or mental activity and does not improve with rest) and other chronic illnesses that develop after infections. But that does not mean we can shrug this problem off or take it lightly. Any complication we experience after COVID-19 must be treated as seriously as the complexities we experience during COVID because they can indicate organ damage.

People who battled the coronavirus might have sustained damage to crucial organs like the heart, kidneys and brain. Again, due to a lack of research, it is not clear how long it takes for these damages to heal. But if not treated properly, they can cause severe harm to the body and can lead to the person developing new illnesses.

So, what to do if you think you have long COVID? Contact your doctor immediately. Tell them what symptoms you have, what makes them worse and when they started. The doctor may then carry out a series of tests before coming to a conclusion and formulating a treatment plan.