April 24, 2022
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Lungs of coronavirus patients
The “long-term new crown,” or long-term symptoms of the new crown, is receiving more and more attention.
According to the clinical definition published by the World Health Organization in October 2021, long-term symptoms of COVID-19 usually “appear within 3 months of infection, persist for at least 2 months, and cannot be explained by other diagnoses”, and symptoms persist for weeks, months or even up to a year.
The three main symptoms of “long new crown”: fatigue, brain fog and muscle pain, the specific manifestations vary from person to person. Other more common persistent symptoms include shortness of breath, chills, body aches, headache, joint pain, chest pain, cough, and persistent loss of taste or smell.
What happens if you get a “long new crown”? BBC Chinese netizens left a message telling us, “I hope to see more actual cases or exclusive interviews of the sequelae of the new crown.” Here are three examples.
Case 1 – Forgetfulness, anxiety: “I feel so useless”
Many people with long-term symptoms report cognitive impairment or memory loss that affects their ability to make daily decisions, talk, follow directions and drive, and impair their quality of life.
Xiaohua (pseudonym) works in the British media. He suffered from depression three years ago. He basically recovered before contracting the new crown in November 2021, and has stopped antidepressants. But following she was infected with the new crown, the depression relapsed. The doctor assessed and judged that one of the symptoms of the new crown, brain fog, continued.
She told the BBC Chinese: “After I got the new crown, I felt like I was ‘brainless’, I didn’t want to do anything, and I felt extremely anxious.”
It started with cold-like symptoms, headache, cough, fever, and loss of taste and smell. There are also chest tightness, shortness of breath, fatigue, insomnia, loss of appetite, forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, unresponsiveness, and anxiety.
“The whole situation is not good, and the weight has lost four kilograms,” she said. “All four members of the family are infected with the new crown, and they are still infected one following another, and they can’t live normally for almost a month before and following.”
“Besides the two children have been feeling tired all the time, they are getting better relatively quickly, but I need to take care of daily life such as food and clothing, and I feel that my life is fragmented, it has become a mess, and I can’t cope at all.”
The children became sensible following Xiao Hua became ill. I would get up every morning to find a school uniform to wear, my 11-year-old would scramble eggs, eat breakfast, and go to school alone. My brother was hungry at night, so he cooked instant noodles and ate it together.
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Xiaohua remembers coughing for three weeks, bedridden for a month, and then took more than three months of long sick leave.
“I mightn’t get out of bed to cook at all. The children ate takeout every day, and they had mouth ulcers for a long time. Fortunately, friends helped us and often brought us home-made food. At that time, volunteers from the community also gave me antidepressants. Come to my house and make sure I can take it on time. The family doctor advised me to call a psychologist once more.”
“The biggest motivator for me was a few home visits from the social worker in charge of child welfare. The well-intentioned help left me with extreme anxiety and insomnia, and I felt like an incompetent mother who mightn’t even do the most basic things to take care of her children. .Did the new crown make me a waste! This is unacceptable to me.”
“The regular doctor’s consultations and the kind greetings from the unit leaders also made me feel like a burden. I didn’t want to be sick all the time. This day-to-day burnout and bedridden made me feel like I was useless.”
For a long time, Xiaohua felt that he had Alzheimer’s disease. Can’t remember anything, looking for something every day. What the doctor said had to be repeated several times to understand. Sometimes following calling in the morning to confirm, call once more in the followingnoon to ask once more.
“Sometimes I don’t know if I’ve ever taken medicine or if I’ve eaten. When I entered the kitchen, I forgot what I was doing. I looked at the pills with a water glass and asked myself if I just took the medicine or not?”
Because of the confusion caused by many small things, Xiaohua deeply doubts his ability to do things. She feels that she must first learn to forgive herself and accept herself who is often tired and forgetful now.
Family doctors and psychiatrists believe that the new crown and its cascading effects have become an incentive for depression to relapse, and the dosage of antidepressants needs to be increased.
It’s been five months since the increase in the dose, the effect is obvious, and she is recovering, she said, but she still has symptoms of anxiety and fatigue, and her physical strength has not fully recovered.
Xiaohua said that now I want to make myself happier and optimistic by doing a small thing every day. Doctors hope to taper off antidepressants within a year.
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share experience
Infected people who do not fully recover for weeks or even months following first showing symptoms are generally considered to be “coronavirus” patients.
The World Health Organization believes that recovery from a new crown infection generally takes 2-6 weeks, but some patients have symptoms that last for weeks or months, while others feel better within a few weeks, and then relapse, with new and old symptoms.published in JAMA Network Open More than half of people with COVID-19 continue to experience at least one symptom six months following diagnosis, a systematic review on
The long-term symptoms of the new crown are also known as the 2019 coronavirus disease long-term syndrome (post-COVID 19 syndrome, or post-Covid syndrome), SARS-CoV-2 post-infection acute sequelae (PASC).
Anyone can develop long-term symptoms following contracting the new coronavirus, and the specific manifestations, severity of symptoms, degree of life impact, and duration vary from person to person.
If you are diagnosed with “long-term new crown”, please use the table below to share your experience.
Case 2 – Fatigue: “I have to sleep for three hours when I come back from the store”
So far “long new crown”most common symptomsis severe fatigue.Other symptoms include: muscle pain, hearing and vision problems, headache, loss of taste and smell, and heart, lung, kidney, and bowel damage, diarrhea，Mental health problems include depression, anxiety and distracted thinking.
Andjelka Janković, who lives in Belgrade and works in cultural marketing, was 33 when he contracted Covid-19 in November 2020. Before that, she practiced yoga, walked, and cooked every day, and often went out to play with friends. The main content of her daily life now is to go to the doctor regularly, have blood tests, and her emotional ups and downs.
She had been suffering from persistent fatigue, fever, and loss of smell and taste for several months before being diagnosed with the “coronavirus”, for which she consulted several doctors with different specialties.
She told BBC Serbian:
At first, my body temperature rose slightly, I felt dizzy, and then my throat started to hurt. A day later, my fever reached 38.5°C. I was bedridden. In the first week of the disease, I didn’t even have the strength to make tea. I felt tired when I got out of bed for a little activity. , and muscle pain, trembling all over.
Later, I went to check and received treatment. After the fever subsided, I took paracetamol once more. After a week, the pain in the body gradually subsided, but then the sense of smell and taste disappeared. After three weeks, the sense of taste returned, but the sense of smell was sometimes absent.
After three weeks of routine viral infection treatment, tachycardia was found, while fatigue symptoms did not decrease.
Frequent blood tests, blood pressure measurements, and lung monitoring. After three weeks of antibiotics and vitamins, it was not effective, and he underwent otolaryngology, pulmonology, cardiology, virology, rheumatology and immunology examinations. Chronic sinusitis was found, and there was adhesion to the heart, but I was not sure whether it was Caused by the new crown is still there before.
Had several lung x-rays, including one with a scanner, and found no lung problems, no pneumonia.
A month later, blood counts stabilized, but mental and physical fatigue, as well as fever, persisted.
For seven months, I had trouble concentrating, lost my way, felt burning, shivering, tired, didn’t know when it would all pass, and felt fear every day.
At the doctor’s advice, a “resurrection” plan was developed, starting walking, but taking a break from time to time, sleeping for at least three hours following going to the store or spending an hour in front of the computer.
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Feeling changes, headaches, fatigue and brain fog are just a few of the symptoms of the “long new crown”
Case 3 – Cognitive Function and Brain Fog: “IQ drops…”
According to the guidelines of the British medical staff, symptoms that last for more than 12 weeks and cannot be explained by other reasons should be classified as “long new crown”, one of which is cognitive function problems, memory and attention loss, “brain fog”.
Clarissa Yasuda is a 46-year-old neurologist, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil. She is currently doing research on long-term symptoms of the new crown, and she is also a “long-term new crown” patient.
Her cognitive impairment symptoms persisted for more than a year and a half without recovery. According to the WHO definition, it is one of the long-term symptoms of the new crown, which occurs three months following the onset of infection and lasts for at least two months, and may recur over time.
“I didn’t get back to normal, from a cognitive standpoint, I didn’t get back to where I was before the coronavirus, in terms of concentration, agility, flexibility… A year and a half later, I feel like I’ve lost only 30-40%,” she said. % has recovered, I am not the same person I was before, and my IQ has dropped.”
“After a year and a half, following a lot of hard work, a lot of self-discipline, a combination of things, my condition has improved. I have an anxiety (cognitive) that I won’t fully recover, but I’m slowly coming to terms with the possibility.”
According to her self-report: In 2020, when she was infected with the new crown, her symptoms were mild, and she had no respiratory problems, but she had dehydration and gastrointestinal discomfort, which occurred more at night; during the day, she had drowsiness, fatigue, memory difficulties, and difficulty with the workload she was used to before. .
In addition, several things can be done at the same time in the past, but now they must be dealt with one by one, and the project is often not completed on time;
As a neuroscientist, she manages to cope with her own conditions, such as getting tired easily, and sleeps 1-1.5 hours more than usual; knowing that she needs to do a very intellectually demanding job, such as working with statistics, she will do it in advance. Be prepared, stay energized, and allow enough time to complete tasks.
Strengthen exercise, do Pilates, weight training, swimming, and occasionally run; keep mental exercises, do memory and math games, logical guessing exercises, etc.
How the new coronavirus affects the nervous system is one of the topics scientists are working on in-depth research. Long-term symptoms of Covid-19 have been noted to include inattention, headaches, loss of smell and taste, depression and mental illness, and the duration of these symptoms is currently uncertain.
Yasuda and her team are tracking and evaluating the effects of COVID-19 on the nervous system for five years or more.
Treatment and recovery of long-term symptoms of COVID-19
The World Health Organization will issue guidelines for the recovery of new crown patients in July 2021.
In hospitalized patients, the rehabilitation process begins during hospitalization, and patients with mild and moderate clinical manifestations are advised to initiate rehabilitation from the onset of disease.
The intensity of respiratory rehabilitation ranges from light breathing exercises to the limit of fatigue, sleeping on your stomach to relieve pressure on your lungs, and resting in a semi-sitting position during the day.
After mild recovery, it is recommended to walk with ease, do breathing exercises, and use mechanical equipment if necessary.
The “long coronavirus” treatment plan proposed by the UK’s National Institute of Health and Care (NICE) includes discussing problems with patients, taking their temperature, examining the heart and lungs and performing an electrocardiogram.
If necessary, patients are referred for pulmonary rehabilitation. Patients with lung disease following infection with the new crown are followed and monitored by pulmonologists.
Medical aspects include treating symptoms, optimizing long-term symptom control, maintaining communication with patients, and limiting adjunctive treatment with antibiotics to confirmed or secondary bacterial infections.
