COVID's Quiet Sickness: The Long Haulers

Last night my family gathered at the dining table and ate together for the first time in a year. We celebrated the second night of Passover, all of us fully vaccinated from COVID-19, and hugged (unmasked!) We are a very affectionate family, and to return to the simple act of holding one another in an embrace was healing in and of itself.

Many of us are grieving, however, not only for the half a million Americans who lost their lives but also the COVID19 “long haulers” that are suffering. One of these is my previously healthy eighteen-year-old nephew. Since he had no medical issues as an active young man, we hoped his relatively asymptomatic COVID19 infection in early January would be a tiny bump in his freshman year at college. We are now seventy days out and he’s still suffering.

Instead of sitting at the seder table with us, he lay on the couch. He’s lost fifteen pounds, and he walks tender footed, as if he may fall. “You can see it in his eyes,” his infectious disease doctor said. He looks half-asleep and feels exhausted. His dorm room lays vacant and his friends wait for him to return. Every week we hope for improvement, and with two or three “good days” our spirits rise. But then the disease returns. Headache, an inability to concentrate, an increased heart rate, and fatigue. The “Covid-Coaster” of ups and many downs.

It’s a quiet sickness, one only those close to the patient will witness. He’s not in the hospital, he’s not at school. He’s home. Out of sight. Current statistics show 10-30% of those infected with COVID-19 will develop long haul. Nationally, that is hundreds of thousands inflicted. It can manifest as a multitude of symptoms, many of which are debilitating. Long-haul clinics are opening all over the country to manage this second crisis, this second pandemic of life-altering illness.

There is so much we do not know.

I continue to pray for answers and the full healing of my nephew and all those who are suffering.