Richmond woman among growing number of COVID-19 ‘long-haulers’ who never fully recovered
Posted July 17, 2020 5:56 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
RICHMOND – A Richmond woman says even though she no longer has COVID-19, she’s still battling symptoms that don’t seem to want to go away nearly five months after first being diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Lorraine Graves is among a growing group of people who are being called “long-haulers” — COVID-19 survivors who continue to deal with the fallout of the virus well after recovery.
Coughing with every deep breath, Graves tells CityNews she’s been battling this particular symptom since March, when she first came down with COVID-19 as one of the first cases in the region.
“Exhausted, I have a very muddled brain,” she says of how she’s feeling months after her diagnosis. “To remember things is hard. To remember a second point is hard. To remember what happened yesterday.”
Graves was never hospitalized or put on a ventilator, yet she’s still exhausted.
“It turns your lungs, instead of being full of air, they feel like they’re full of egg white. And you hurt. I lost my sense of smell and my sense of taste. I was in pain,” she recalls.
The Richmond woman is part of a growing number of long-haulers looking for answers and help. There are Facebook support groups connecting these people with each other around the world.
Graves joined one group called Survivor Corps, based out of the U.S., with more than 70,000 members. The group aims to educate and mobilize COVID-19 survivors by “connecting them with the medical, scientific and academic research community, to help stem the tide of this pandemic and assist in the national recovery.”
There is also a group out of Ontario serving the same purpose of providing members with much-needed emotional support, however, Graves says they’re also mobilizing as a grassroots movement.
“What we’re hoping is governments will listen, researchers will listen, doctors will listen,” Graves says. “One of the things we need so badly is respiratory therapists.”
A Canada-wide study is currently trying to figure out why some people don’t seem to recover from COVID-19. More than 100 investigators are expected to study 2,000 patients.
“Is it because of the genetics? Is it because of other issues? Like maybe because they have certain diseases? So we are going to study that to see why some people do better than others and why we have problems with some people with lingering symptoms,” says Dr. Angela Cheung, senior scientists, University Health Network, who co-leads the study.
It’s unclear what percentage of patients have lingering symptoms, with Cheung saying there’s no good data on that.
“As you can imagine, it’s still early on. From the start to now it’s not even six months,” Cheung notes, adding there’s also some uncertainty around whether these long-haulers will ever fully recover.
The study’s is expected to take a year, however, Cheung says researchers hope to have preliminary research to share in six months for preliminary results.
In the meantime, Graves is worried she will never get back to her pre-COVID-19 health.
“Oh yes, very much so,” Graves admits. “Yes. It’s a huge worry because no one can tell us what’s going to happen because we’re the first batch of acknowledged people who’ve had it.”
To date, there have been more than 109,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Canada, with close to 73,000 recovered. The country has reported more than 8,800 deaths related to the coronavirus.
Anyone interested in taking part in the study can email cancov@uhn.ca.
