It was just a couple of months into the pandemic when patients in online support groups began describing the phenomenon. In some emergency departments, they said, their complaints were largely being dismissed—or at the very least diminished—by health care professionals. The patients felt they were not being heard, or perhaps even were outright disbelieved. 10 Sec
The common thread through these comments was a basic one. Each of the patients had already been infected with COVID-19 and presumably had recovered, yet each was still dealing with symptoms of the disease—sometimes vague, sometimes nonspecific—that simply would not go away. Physicians and nurses, already overloaded with emergent cases of the virus, were baffled, often searching for other, more benign explanations for what they were being told.
We now have a term for those patients—and the truth is, “long hauler” only begins to describe the COVID-related ordeals they are enduring. Of all the facets of the virus we have dealt with in 2020, this one may ultimately prove the most difficult to recognize, much less combat.
Long-haul COVID patients carry their symptoms well beyond what we’ve come to understand as a “normal” course of recovery. It can last for weeks. For some long haulers, it has been months—and counting. And to the consternation of physicians and nurses on the front lines, the symptoms of these patients often present as so varied and relatively common that they defy a solid COVID-related diagnosis.
