There's a great deal of important information in the following report -- although much of it is probably already known to readers who closely follow Covid-19 news. But I'm going to skip over much in the report to highlight an emerging discovery about what could be as high as 35 percent of recovered Covid patients getting an illness known as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.
I also want to emphasize what the report says about heart problems that can accompany Covid even after recovery from the infection.
June 24, 2020
Fox News/Associated Press
[includes video]
Watson said she has had a persistent fever for nearly three months now, along with a handful of other disconcerting symptoms.
LOS ANGELES - Since the first reported cases of the novel coronavirus, several support groups have emerged on Facebook consisting of thousands of members calling themselves “long haul survivors,” reporting COVID-19 symptoms that they say have lasted for months.
“Today is day 93,” said Amy Watson, a preschool teacher who lives in Portland, Oregon as she shared a photograph of her thermometer that read 100.3 on June 18. She first tested positive for COVID-19 on April 11, after falling ill with flu-like symptoms in mid-March.
Watson said she has had a persistent fever for nearly three months now, along with a handful of other disconcerting symptoms.
Watson said she first came down with the flu-like symptoms on March 15, when she developed a cough and fever. She felt some of the worst of the illness for about a week, until, she said, she started to feel better, only to have the illness return like “a ton of bricks.”
While she said the initial symptoms of congestion and cough have since subsided, she continues to experience other manifestations of the illness.
“These other symptoms that have just been hanging on are the ones that nobody knows how to treat and fix,” said Watson. “I’ve got this fever, I got this crazy burning sensation, nerve pain that’s like under my skin, incredible fatigue.”
Watson, whose only underlying condition before contracting COVID-19 was asthma, added that she has to sit down and rest every time she performs any menial task. [Pundita note: I read months ago that oddly, the virus tends to leave asthmatics alone, and/or not seriously infect them.]
Back in March when she first reported feeling sick, it was nearly impossible for her to get a COVID-19 test. She said she called an advice nurse, who told her to assume it was the novel coronavirus and isolate herself for two weeks, which she did.
“The 14 days passed and I was still sick,” said Watson. She was prescribed multiple rounds of antibiotics after she reached three weeks of being symptomatic with the illness.
[...]
Since getting sick [from Covid], Hornig [Dr Mady Hornig, an immunologist and professor of epidemiology at Columbia University] said she’s had to carry a pulse oximeter with her, a device which registers her pulse since she began to have tachycardia episodes when her fever began to decline. Tachycardia is a condition that can make your heart beat abnormally fast, reducing blood flow to the rest of your body, according to The Mayo Clinic.
Her most recent episode was on June 22. Her pulse registered at 135 beats per minute, which she said occurred just from her sitting at her computer. She said a normal pulse for someone her age would be around 60-70 beats per minute.
Amy Watson also said that her heart rate has been known to escalate and drop dramatically since she has been sick, and she said she was forced to go to urgent care after an incident she had last week when she thought she was having a heart attack.
While it was not a heart attack Watson was experiencing, she was diagnosed with pleurisy, a very painful illness in which tissue that separate the lungs from the chest wall becomes inflamed.
While symptoms like “COVID toes” and month-long fevers have left some medical workers perplexed, some illnesses stemming from the coronavirus are not entirely without precedent.
Hornig has been researching one particular illness that has previously been linked to other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS.
According to the CDC, coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals. Many people have previously experienced a coronavirus in the form of the common cold. But COVID-19 has not previously been identified in humans
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is an illness Hornig said has been found in patients who have recovered from coronaviruses such as SARS. The CDC cites a 2015 report from the nation’s top medical advisory body, the Institute of Medicine, which says that an estimated 836,000 to 2.5 million Americans suffer from ME/CFS.
The CDC says that people with ME/CFS experience severe fatigue, sleep problems, as well as difficulty with thinking and concentrating while experiencing pain and dizziness.
Hornig said SARS-CoV-1 and MERS have been associated with longer-term difficulties, in which many people appeared to have symptoms of ME/CFS.
In April, advocates of the Solve ME/CFS Initiative (Solve M.E.) virtually stormed Capitol Hill for the fourth annual ME/CFS Advocacy day, which the organization calls a “national event to educate congress about the neuroimmune disease.”
According to the organization, nearly 35 percent of COVID-19 patients are experiencing ME/CFS adding that the illness typically follows a viral infection.
“ME/CFS is an urgent public health crisis based on what is happening in our country right now,” says Emily Taylor, Director of Advocacy and Community Relations at Solve M.E. “Evidence suggests that a virus as serious and widespread as COVID-19 could ignite rapid and significant growth in the ME/CFS population in just 36 months ..."
[...]
The number of new coronavirus cases across the [USA] per day has reached more than 26,000, up from about 21,000 two weeks ago, according to an Associated Press analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Over 120,000 deaths in the U.S. have been blamed on the virus, the highest toll in the world.
[END REPORT]
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