Last May, Marie, 36, contracted Covid-19… and has not yet fully recovered. “Without the PCR test, I would have blamed my sore throat and runny nose on a bad cold. So, at first, I didn’t worry at all. But then I stayed abnormally tired all summer, with occasional memory loss that still persists,” she says. Whereas in general one is supposed to recover from this disease in two or three weeks.
No link to severity of infection
If the symptoms persist beyond four weeks, the health authorities believe that we can evoke a long Covid. This condition is far from rare: 30% of people who have had Covid-19 still feel symptoms following three months, according to the latest data from Public Health France. “And it has nothing to do with the severity of the initial infection. We may have had a mild form and suffer from a long Covid, ”notes Céline Castera, spokesperson for the AprèsJ20 patient association. Like Covid-19, its long form is more or less disabling. It appears in very different ways and can affect all organs. More than two hundred signs have been identified! These include muscle or joint pain, neurocognitive, ocular, digestive, cardiac, skin disorders, loss of smell… The most frequent manifestations remain fatigue,…