What does long COVID feel like?
SACRAMENTO – For Anna Chumley, her longhaul COVID-19 symptoms started with a rash. One that would appear and reappear randomly, spotting her back, face and neck with itchy, red bumps. Then, came the constant back pain, chest pain and racing heart.
Chumley, who caught COVID in summer 2020, said she would sometimes feel like she couldn’t breathe.
“I honestly felt like I was dying but I didn’t know from what,” the Atlantabased Emory University law student said. “It was like the strangest thing. And like the problem was, unfortunately, when you feel like that, life doesn’t slow down around you. I still had exams to take, I still had zoom classes to attend.”
She ignored the symptoms, until one day, while driving, the 22-year-old’s chest started to tighten. She was confused.
“I have no clue why this is happening,” she thought to herself at the time. “I’m not running, I’m not super stressed out.”
Chumley called her mom, a family nurse practitioner, who told her it was time to go to a doctor.
Around the same time, a former Sacramento area massage therapist reopened his previously shuttered business. He had also been sick with what he now believes was COVID-19, though it went undiagnosed.
He had mostly recovered from his infection by July 2020. But the 34-year-old, who asked for anonymity to protect his medical information and business reputation, said memory loss and brain fog plagued his entire summer.
He said he was making scheduling errors and double-booking clients.
“Eventually, it became clear to me that the frequency and the type of errors that I was making, I would endanger my clients and their health and their bodies,” he said. “I started becoming convinced that I needed to actually just retire and like, stop working because my brain wasn’t the same anymore.”
He closed his practice again and contracted COVID for the second time in fall 2020. He ended up getting a second bout of long-haul symptoms, but this time, he said they were worse.
This year, in Santa Barbara County, California, 31-yearold Joshua Parra would be forced awake in the middle of the night.
He said he felt a burning sensation in his feet and legs as if needles were pricking the bed of his foot. Then, he started feeling joint pain in his toes.
Although Parra is in the early months post-infection, he is experiencing typical long-haul symptoms. Doctors, however, have not attributed this directly to the infection, he told The Bee.
Parra, who has not received his vaccine, got COVID-19 in early September at a local community college where he was studying industrial engineering. By October, new symptoms were appearing.
A few days after noticing the neuropathy in his feet, he started seeing large amounts of hair in his sink.
“Over the course of a week, I began to see a lot of my hair falling out and thinning to the point you could see my scalp,” Parra wrote, preferring to answer questions via email because he said COVID-19 had affected his voice and speech. “I shaved my head to avoid seeing the daily hair loss.”
Parra, who once ran Spartan Races, climbed Mt. Whitney, backpacked in the Sierra Mountains and surfed the Pacific, now had seizures, severe fatigue, chronic headaches and heart and digestive issues, he said.
“I worry that when I go to sleep, I will wake up with a new debilitating condition that will reduce the quality of my life,” he wrote. “When will this end?”
What’s the risk of getting long haul COVID?
Getting long haul COVID, also known as long COVID, is not uncommon.
A study from PLOS Medicine, a non-profit medical journal, found that “over 1 in 3 patients had one or more features of longCOVID recorded between 3 and 6 months after a diagnosis of COVID-19.”
Recent research, however, has differing standpoints on who is more susceptible to lingering symptoms.
PLOS Medicine found that the risk of long COVID was higher in people who had severe infections and was slightly higher in females and young adults.
A study from September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Long Beach found that people 40 years and older, women, Black individuals and those with known pre-existing conditions “reported higher numbers” of long COVID.
The CDC notes, “As the number of recovered COVID-19 patients increases, monitoring the prevalence of postacute sequelae among larger cohorts in diverse populations will be necessary to understand and manage this condition.”
Post-acute sequelae refers to long COVID. In layman’s terms, we don’t know everything yet.
And according to Dr. Christian Sandrock of the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, there is no specific age or gender group that is more likely to experience long haul COVID.
However, Sandrock, who works with patients who have acute COVID and long haul symptoms at UC Davis Health, said pre-existing mental health conditions can be impacted by long COVID.
“If you’ve either had strong anxiety or depression or prior PTSD, we’re seeing that those are risk factors,” he said.
Particularly in patients that have worsened anxiety, depression and brain fog after COVID, he added.
Dr. Khai V. Tran, a family medicine doctor in Fremont and chair of family medicine at Kaiser Permanente Northern California, added that COVID could also worsen conditions such as asthma and emphysema.