Some Are Experiencing 'Chronic COVID' Symptoms for up to Months

digestive problems, and erratic heart rates. Simothy Ready Wall Street Journals, your health columnist joints for what could be causing these long term effects. Thanks for joining us, Simmothy, Thanks for having me. I wanted to talk about these long haul COVID patients, people that are experiencing symptoms for weeks, maybe months after they were expected to recover. You know, they say, my old normal cases of COVID nineteen can last year, about two weeks before you recover. But this is part

of what this novel coronavirus is. We're finding out that everybody is responding to this differently, and a lot of times people are experiencing these long symptoms of severe fatigue, cognitive issues, memory loss, they call it brain fog. People are experiencing digestive problems, the erratic heart rates, and there's a lot of stuff that is that is going into this. So Simothy tell us a little bit more about what we're learning of these long term effects people are experiencing.

It's they're really interesting phenomenon to to have people who in many cases they're sort of acute COVID. Their initial COVID isn't that bad. That's not everyone, but and just in many cases, so you know, they're sick, they sick for a couple of weeks, they think they've recovered or feel better, only they haven't. So for some of them, they're developing new symptoms weeks later, and they symptoms will persist for months and sumptions are going on for now six, seven,

eight months, and in others they're actually getting worse. So what was sort of a mild case of cod initially has now evolved into way sort of chronic condition whe they're developing new and even worsening symptoms, you know, months later and really not getting any better. You spoke to a lot of people that are these long haulers are experiencing these types of symptoms, and I think one of the people you spoke to put it best, and it

can just feel the frustration of it. They said, I feel like there has to be some sort of next step because I'm not ready to accept that this is my new reality. Basically, like, there has to be this point where I get over it. You know, it can't be like this forever. Um. In many cases, these are young and extremely healthy people. I mean, I've reviewed dozens of them over the past four months, and I've interviewed marathon runners, I've interviewed avid skiers, surfers, and these are

people who were extremely active and athletics beforehand. Again, that's not everyone, but it seems like a large percentage of them are so to go from having no chronic conditions to be young and healthy and active to basically being debilitated to the point where you know, a lot of them can't walk more than five blocks down the street or even all without a wheelchair or a cane or something to support them. You know, it's quite like transforming

and obviously extremely frustrating. Let's try to put some numbers to this, and you know, it's it's hard to do that, but there was a recent study of more than four thousand COVID patients and they found out that about ten percent of those they were eighteen forty nine struggled symptoms for four weeks after becoming sick. That's just one part of it. You know, there's people that are obviously experiencing

things longer than that. Those numbers drop off, and there's sort of the rough estimate that you get from a lot of different places that this affects. It seems to effect about ten to fiftcent of the population, or at least those people that are still sick after a month. It's hard to know how many of them get better.

I mean, according to that one sort of symptom tracker, it seemed to drop by about half that by two months you had about four or five percent of people that were still sick, and then after three months it was down to two. But there is a lot of criticism from sort of patient groups about that to Go app just because it's a daily app. So obviously some people, particularly if they're really stick, gets sick of sort of logging on every day, they might just stop doing the app.

That doesn't mean they're better or recovered, but it's translated that way, so it probably those mems are a very conservative estimate. There's other long term symptoms associated with other viral outbreaks, things like stars and mers and all that, But what makes COVID different is all the different organs

that it can affect. And the leading explanation for this that doctors really thing why people get affected in so many different ways and and then get these longer symptoms is that they think it has a lot to do with inflammation sort of. The leading theory is that inflammation and possibly in the body has an autoimmune response, so it's sort of attacking its own tissue in Oregon, that might be what's driving the damage. You know, it's also

obviously under investigation and being researched. It's unclear whether that's being written by sort of viral fragments that are left in the body that aren't enough for anyone to be infectious, but that are triggering inflammation and sort of autoimmune response, or if there's actual virus vile traces like actually lodged in in a different part of the body that could be kind of reactivating almost like a dormant virus and

causing symptoms. A lot of patients do complain of sort of like cyclical systems like feeling better for a couple of weeks and then redopting and feeling sick. So that sort of theory might drive with that. And you've been looking into this for a long time, Like you said, you've spoken to many people, even children that come down with COVID nineteen in some cases are getting some longer term effects. A lot of that has to do with

gas row intentional stuff, headache, shortness of breath, things like that. Yeah, I mean, this is really all consuming. I've talked to patients who have severe g I issues, severe cognitive issues, brain fogs, rashes, hair loss, high, very high heart rates, very multi some symptoms. And one of the leading sort of theory is that these people are developing disautonomia, which is sort of a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system.

And it's an umbrella term, and it's commonly triggered by viruses, so not just COVID, but it's just triggered by influenza or stars or other things, and it affects different organ systems, so it can affective breathing, your heart rate, your blood pressure, digestion. So that's some of these patients are starting to sort of get a digohoster and treated for that. And so how are doctors trying to treat these other things? I mean, obviously you have to wait for these symptoms to persist

to actually you start addressing it. But what are doctors figuring out? What are they going to try to do with it? There's a lot of caution how to treat this, Like I just mentioned disautonomia, this audoonomia. You know, it causes tachocardia, which is an erratic heart rate, but it's not you don't have damage to your actual heart. The way you might treat someone like disautonomia would be really bad if you actually did have heart damage. So the

patients have to undergo very careful evaluations. Like before you would treat disarnomia, you'd want to get an echo cardiogram or cardiac MR. I make sure that person that doesn't have myocardiais or something you know, cardiac problem with more cardiac in nature that would have to be treated differently.

So there's a lot of tests were ruling out of things like to make sure there's no permanent sort of organ damage that's going on, and they are finding since the organ damage but in a very small minority of patients. Best of luck to these people that do get these long term symptoms, and hopefully doctors can get better at treating it. And you know where we're going through this. We're still learning constantly more things about COVID nineteen, so

we'll see what happens. Simothy Ready, Wall Street Journals, your health columnist, Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday to Friday, so follow us on I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast