SAN DIEGO – More than three years later, COVID continues to surprise us, and despite endless studies on the pandemic, it remains a mystery at times and there are people who have had to learn to live with COVID.
“COVID doesn’t play, it’s here to stay, I think he fell in love with me, I think I’m so irresistible,” says Clarissa López, who laughs today, but when she has been under the clutches of COVID-19, she doesn’t even want to smile.
“It was something ugly, horrible, I don’t wish it on anyone, it’s not fun,” he says.
López has been sick with the coronavirus four times:
The first, when we interviewed her in December 2021; the second in March 2022; in June he was infected for the third time and just a few weeks ago at the end of July.
President Joe Biden’s relapse of coronavirus has raised some questions regarding the rebound of the coronavirus and the drug Paxlovid. Experts say however, that rebound reinfections are rare.
“I fell back into the hospital, my breath went down, oxygen, I was drowning, they had to take me to the emergency room,” says the 52-year-old woman.
According to Paul Schalch, an otolaryngologist, when a person is immunocompromised, as in the case of López, who suffered from breast cancer, cases of reinfection of the coronavirus are more common.
“There are people whose immune system does not generate a lasting response once morest the virus, so it protects them for a while following an infection, but once that time passes the infection can become a possibility once more if you are exposed to the infection” Schalch explains.
However, because the positive results for COVID have been registered in the span of seven months. Schalch believes that these are most likely new infections with different strains of the virus.
López has had to isolate himself at home several times and depend on organizations such as Club Libertad Justicia y Ley to survive, which each week deliver around 15 pantries to the homes of people infected with COVID.
“The same relatives sometimes do not want to support the same family and we as an organization and we support them, we do not find their home, we put them outside,” says Raquel Alameda of the Club Libertad Justicia y Ley.
At the beginning of the pandemic López, who we talked to while selling masks on a corner in Golden Hills, did not believe that COVID was as serious as the health authorities made it out to be. He has been vaccinated several times and has a booster.
More due to his bad experience with the pandemic, he feels his life is in limbo, “Tomorrow we don’t know, it’s not promised, I love my life.”
Now he lives in constant fear of catching COVID. Meanwhile, López has undergone a series of studies with an infection specialist to find out in depth why she has been infected on several occasions.
