September 8, 2021 • 33 mins
Some coronavirus patients have never recovered. They suffer vivid dreams, insomnia, and a host of other weird symptoms that are nothing like the respiratory illness we think of as COVID-19. They have long COVID, and they’ve had it since the beginning of the pandemic.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. After the Russian flu epidemic in the
early eighteen nineties, some survivors described odd and oddly lingering symptoms.
One of them, the English feminist Josephine Butler, wrote to
a friend, I am so weak that if I read
or write for half an hour, I become so tired
(00:28):
and faint that I have to lie down. That was
more than three months after she'd gotten the flu. Twenty
five years later, just before the start of the Spanish
flu pandemic, the Austrian neurologist Constantine vent Economo described a
series of patients who had unusual and unusually sustained symptoms.
(00:50):
These patients had symptoms that range from meningitis to delirium,
from extreme tiredness to weakness in the hands or feet,
are almost the complete opposite, involuntary twitching and jerking, and insomnia,
and even more unsettling, A lot of these patients died
because so many patients had unbearable exhaustion. Economo named whatever
(01:14):
these patients had and cephalitis lethargica. The disease seemed to
center around Vienna at first, but when the Spanish flu
came and spread throughout the world, the mysterious disease seemed
to follow its footsteps to other parts of Europe and
the United States. It affected at least one hundred thousand
people in Western Europe. Its precise cause and relationship to
(01:35):
the Spanish flu is still a mystery today. Fifteen years later,
in nineteen thirty four, an outbreak of atypical polio struck
one hundred and ninety eight people, most of them doctors
and nurses, at a Los Angeles hospital. The authors of
a paper about this outbreak at LA Hospital wrote that
(01:55):
the polio was so variable that no syndrome can be
described which accurately portrays the clinical picture. Instead of the
more typical symptoms of polio like these patients had all
sorts of other symptoms nausea, vomiting, muscle twitching, constipation, vertigo,
and double vision. Any sort of exercise or exertion caused
(02:15):
them debilitating fatigue. They had trouble sleeping and memory lapses,
and the symptoms lasted. Even six months later, more than
half of the afflicted staff couldn't go back to work,
and more than a decade after that some of the
patients were still suffering. Which is all to say that
long haulers are not unique to COVID nineteen. In fact,
(02:37):
they are not unique even to this coronavirus. Chronic symptoms
have been documented in patients with stars Wan and Mers.
What is unique about long COVID, which is a term
created by patients for patients, is that many millions of
people have it all at once, and these long haulers
are resourceful, driven and speaking aloud about it in unison,
(02:58):
in the news, on social media, and to each other.
The other thing that's unique about long COVID is that
if it's still a mystery and understudied and misunderstood, it's
not being swept completely under the rug. This podcast is
about the history of vaccines, but maybe I don't talk
enough about why we even need vaccines. It's about preventing mortality,
(03:22):
of course, but it's also about preventing morbidity, the suffering
from illness and chronic disease. And that's what we're going
to talk about in this episode about long COVID, or
rather that's what two long COVID patients are going to
tell us about. It's not always pretty or upbeat, but
these conversations will open your eyes. He had another reason
(03:42):
you don't want to get COVID nineteen. Because there's no
guarantee that you'll ever recover from My Heart Radio and
School of Humans. I'm sean review and this is long shot.
(04:03):
Let's just start from the beginning. So when did you
start feeling ill? This started back in February twenty, twenty twenty. Sorry,
that's Dave Hackaday. He's forty eight years old, lives in
Oxford in the UK. He's married with a couple of kids.
He works in humanitarian ed I've worked in war zones,
civil conflict zones, and there's been bombs and shooting around,
(04:25):
so I'm fairly used to crisis and managing anxiety. And
in February twenty twenty he started feeling a little sick,
extremely heavy running nose, which is quite grim. Actually, I've
never had anything like that before, but the usual, you know,
kind of mild fever, aches and pains, feeling a bit
dizzy and a bit unwell, just in bed for a
(04:47):
couple of days. Nothing serious, just a fairly heavy cold
or fever. By the time Dave starts feeling symptoms, he
and his family are already aware of the virus spreading
in China, but there are only a dozen or so
cases in the UK over the following weeks. Novel coronavirus
cases are reported in Japan and Thailand, South Korea, France, Australia, Brazil, India, Egypt,
(05:10):
and Italy. There are tens of thousands of cases in China,
but very low numbers elsewhere in the world. A person
here and there, nothing to cause panic. In Oxford. Dave
continues living his life, but he sees the writing on
the wall and cuts back on some activities. He mostly
works from home borders his groceries online. One of the
few things Dave continues doing like normal is going to
(05:32):
the gym. He's a really active person, likes to do
high intensity interval training and things like that. I was
pretty fair and I had a good diet, no underlying comorbidities.
The only thing I was doing was going to the gym,
and I'd heard about some people started complaining of coughs
and fevers and stuff, so you know, I'm pretty sure
(05:53):
I picked it up from the gym. He gets sick
at the end of February, feels like a pretty bad cold,
but he isn't overly worried. But since he knows about
this coronavirus, he calls one one one, which is direct
line to the National Health Service. Basically, someone in the
UK might call one one one if they're sick, but
it's not really an emergency. They were saying, well, look,
(06:14):
if you haven't got a cough or a high fever,
and you haven't been to China or been with anyone
who's been in Italy, then it probably isn't probably just
a seasonal cold and that's been That was their position
at the time. Even though the NHS is telling Dave
he doesn't have coronavirus, he quarantines himself for a few
days as he recovers. And so what happened after that,
(06:36):
I kind of got a typical virus that kind of
felt better. Within four or five days, I was back
on the bike, you know, cycling around Oxford again, you know,
sort of staying fairly low, not really going anywhere there's
lots of people. The only reason I went out was
to go back to the gym again. Really maybe popped
into the office once or twice. Dave thinks he's in
(06:57):
the clear, even though he doesn't know if he even
had coronavirus. The symptoms are gone, but then it comes
back even harder. Than before. It was actually much the ninth,
that's March the twenty twenty. I was starting to feel
a little bit weird, quite unusual levels of fatigue. And
this isn't just kind of like feeling a bit tired
at the end of the day. It was starting to
(07:19):
feel a bit jet laggy, you know, if you've been
on a long haul flight, maybe really quite a deep,
deep tiredness. Dave thinks maybe he's run down from work,
just needs some time to relax, but the symptimes get
worse and weirder. I remember writing a Skype message to
a work quality around about that time, just saying, God, yeah,
(07:41):
I just I just had a really bad night. I
couldn't sleep, I was having nightmares, couldn't breathe properly. The
worst thing was probably the chest pain and the compression
that gradually each day got slowly worse and worse, and it,
you know, I can describe it as like you know,
having an anvil on your chest, suffocating feeling, and they're
(08:03):
also sharp pain sort of radiating down the left hand
side of my chest and arm, which you know, I'm
a middle aged man, and these warning signs that you
don't ignore, so it's just getting worse each day. And
then of course the fatigue was building, that was getting worse,
and there was just generally feeing, starting to feel really
unwell inflamed hots, getting chills at night time and night sweats, insomnia,
(08:28):
dreadful nightmares. My god, the nightmares were horrific. By this time.
In the UK, schools are closed, restaurants and pubs are closed,
Parliament is closed, even the Church of England is closed.
The entire country is on lockdown as thousands of Brits
have tested positive for COVID nineteen, including Prime Minister Boris
(08:49):
Johnson and Prince Charles. In April twenty twenty, the Queen
gives a rare televised address to the nation. While we
have faced challenges before, this one is different. This time
we join with all nations across the globe in a
common endeavor, using the great advances of science and our
(09:11):
instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed. By then, these
symptoms are scaring the shit out of him. I remember
waking up in a cold sweat, having had a nightmare
that I couldn't actually breathe, And I woke up and
I couldn't actually breathe. It was the most terrifying thing.
This time he calls, like calling nine one in the US.
(09:37):
An ambulance comes to the house. And that was the
first point I kind of realized I was in the
middle of something quite unusual because they did all the
usual vital signs. So they took oxygen, they did blood pressure,
and they took some blood. They took temperatures and they
found nothing. Nothing. They said, you're absolutely you know, as
far as we can see from a triage perspective, there's
(09:59):
nothing wrong with you. Take some paracetamol and go to bed.
What did you think at this point? I thought I
was dying. The problem was Dave didn't know what illness
he had. It was so early in the pandemic in
the UK that getting tested was no easy task. Even
after calling an ambulance and telling the EMTs he feels
(10:21):
like he's going to die, he can't get tested. It's
mind blowing. Yeah, you know a lot of US first
waivers people who came down with it in January February March,
there were no tests available. You had to be dying
or admitted to hospital to have a test. His symptoms
are bad, but not typical COVID nineteen symptoms as they
(10:43):
were known. Then another time, when he calls one one
one this happens. I remember as clear as day. I said, look,
I'm feeling really unwell. I can't breathe properly. I really
I think I need help. And the person says, it's
nothing we can do for you. Our hospitals are full.
If you know, if you're not dying, then there's nothing
we can do about it. I said, well, you know,
how do I know that I'm not dying? And she
(11:04):
and blessed their you know, fair play. He just said,
you know, don't call back unless a your lips tone
blue or be you pass out unconscious. And I remember
just thinking, you know, if I've passed out unconscious, how
can I'll call you. It's not a criticism at all.
It's indicitous of the state of crisis that the country
(11:27):
and many countries were in at that point. We just
did not know what was going on. Dave doesn't know
what to do with a surge of really sick people.
Hospitals in the UK are doing their best to help
coronavirus patients, but Dave doesn't check the normal COVID boxes.
Most patients if they recover, do so within two weeks
(11:51):
or maybe a month if they have a severe case
and need hospitalization. His case is severe, but in a
totally different way. Dave doesn't need a ventilator, and the
thing is he doesn't know what he needs. Nobody does.
I felt really alone, you know. I just thought there's
something wrong with me in my head. Maybe there's some
(12:11):
anxiety in there, you know, I just did not know
what was going on. He keeps a log of his
illness that he eventually turns into a blog. April twenty second,
day forty five. Breathing, restricted, heavy headache, insomnia, anxiety, claustrophobia,
extreme fatigue, pins and needles and weird joint pain, sleep, apnea.
(12:34):
April twenty seventh, day fifty symptoms persist, Call local GP
for advice, request X ray, ECG and blood tests declined.
Signed off work for May April thirtieth night chills and sweats,
extreme fatigue, worsening, cough, fever, and breathlessness. May first woke
up feeling slightly better, first headache free day since late February. Okay,
(12:59):
so at this point he's feeling somewhat hopeful, But then
May second relapse overnight, chess pain returned quite severely, shortness
of breath acute again. Advice from doctor is that this
is recovering COVID nineteen and to readjust recovery expectations from
weeks to months. May sixth, significant improvements and symptoms following
(13:20):
an incredibly deep sleep, one of the deepest night's sleep
I've had in years, like being under anesthetic. May seventh,
day sixty Continued recovery, like coming out from underneath heavy, dusty,
suffocating old rug. May eighth, relapse, But that day, on
May eighth, Dave reads an article by a professor of
(13:42):
infectious diseases in Liverpool who describes his own roller coaster
of unexplainable symptoms, and for the first time, Dave sees
that he's not alone. He starts finding Facebook groups with
thousands of people sharing their unusual and harrowing COVID experiences.
I just stole ban guy, God, I'm not alone, you know.
And then none of this darkness and mine of this
(14:02):
weirdness and quite frankly terrifying experience. I found my people.
What they are going through doesn't even have a name yet.
But on May twenty of twenty twenty. Doctor Elisa Pedigo,
an archaeologist, coins the term long COVID as a hashtag
on Twitter. Dave finds a community of people willing to
(14:23):
take his illness seriously. One of the most mysterious symptoms
that long COVID patients describe as brain fog, and Dave
got it one time. He was in the middle of
a conference call with twenty people and just couldn't remember
(14:45):
what he was supposed to be saying, just at one point,
being in the middle of the sentence and just forgetting,
just forgetting what I was talking about, what we were
talking about, what it was I was supposed to be summarizing,
and I just couldn't, could not remember. And I just thought,
oh my god, there's this big black hole where my
memory should have been and where the decision should have been,
(15:05):
and I just couldn't. I couldn't summon it up. Dave
was really freaked out. And it doesn't even like to
use the term brain fag because it sounds cartoonish. It
sounds kind of quite cute, and what people are witnessing
experiencing is not in any way cute or funny. It's
(15:26):
you know, it's dementia like symptoms, you just forget what
you're doing, you forget words, you forget where you are.
To learn more about brain fag, I turned to someone
who studies brains. So I'm Athena Acrammy and I'm a
neuroscientist at University College London. I have my own lab
studying various aspects of learning memory, specifically related to a
(15:50):
kind of unsupervised learning in human rodents computational models. Athena
has her own lab to study brains, and one of
the best universities on earth to do so. In other words,
she's brilliant. But in March twenty twenty, she gets sick,
and she, like Dave Hockaday and millions of other people,
(16:10):
starts getting weird symptoms that won't go away. At first,
she thinks she has a normal COVID. It sounded as
a bomber, But at the same time I was quiet,
kind of happy, maybe in a sense that Okay, in
a couple of weeks, I will be over it. Really,
I had this mentality, and now that I got it,
it's fine. That's not what happened. Two weeks became three
(16:32):
weeks became four weeks, and my initial symptoms day were
very classic. I had cough and fever and fatigue, shortness
of breath, but then it just slowly slody. New symptoms
started to appear. Her cough is almost resolved after four weeks,
but the new symptoms are bizarre. But I had a
lot of joint pain, kidney pain, shortness of breath, slip
(16:56):
up me pins and needless started to appear. And I
had this kind of a specific extreme episode of sugaring
that it started one day around noon and then continued
until morning the day after. So I was just like
completely paralyzed. I was just like shaking. I was not
sure it is this really? Am I having some seizure? Maybe, well,
(17:18):
what is this? She goes to the hospital, But in
the hospital doctors really didn't know what's going on. What's
wrong with me? Right that he didn't have anything to
comment on except saying that, well, it seems like the
first indications, like taking X ray, chest X ray, it's normal,
you're blood indicators, they're not really that off. So maybe
(17:41):
you're stressed out. Maybe you're just like and I would
just like, you don't know me. I'm not stressed out.
I'm not a person that just I can't easily get
it stressed out. The next time she goes to the
hospital is even worse, and the second time again, I
had another episode of delirium, so I was I had
a really high fever, and I think I went through
(18:02):
a patch of like more than forty eight hours of
no sleep. Even if I was completely dead and tired,
I could not sleep. And then either the insomnia introduced
some kind of induced some delirium and hallucination. You're confused,
you're disconnected, you don't know where you are, you can't
really kind of ground yourself into into reality. And I
(18:23):
had a lot of really weird sleep at me. I said,
up to this point, I still get them. They're just
like whenever I'm like, I just wake up gasping for air.
Right whenever I was just like becoming unconscious falling asleep,
I was just like waking up gasping for air. And
that was really kind of exhausting and scary. I would say,
(18:45):
like Dave, she's very active, she go to the gym
three times a week. Now she can barely take a
walk without crashing and having to spend days in bed,
and the worst part for her is the brain fog
before really kind of learning and hearing about the term
brain fog. I was describing that to my husband as
just like my mom is so cloudy. I can't I
(19:08):
can't access information easily. I just don't remember things that
happened maybe half an hour ago. I used to have
a very sharp memory and that was gone. The obvious
sort of weirdness here is that you know, you're a
brain scientist who's experiencing brain fog. Is, how has that
made you feel? It's a difficult question. I think it
(19:31):
kind of motivates me more to understand it. And I
was pretty scared by it, to be honest, because most
of my contribution to into basically my job is comes
from my active thinking, right, and that was disrupted, and
it was difficult to come in peace with it. Right.
(19:51):
I really wanted to pretend that things are normal. I
wanted to pretend that I can sit on meetings and
just like you know, kind of go on with my
with my science and with my activities as usual. But
they were extremely taxing. Around the same time that Dave
finds the Facebook groups, Athena finds a Slack support group
called body Politic started by journalist Fiona Lowenstein. On body
(20:16):
Politic Athena finds much of the same validation that Dave
finds and the Facebook groups. She isn't exaggerating or just stressed,
and she is far from a loan on one Slack channel.
People are collecting data by the types of symptoms that
long COVID patients like themselves are experiencing. She joins and
starts helping. At this point, we want to just like
(20:39):
try to aggregate data, collect data to understand it. And
that was a kind of a temporary I hope that
offered the group, but that was the beginning of their
really whole journey. They put out a report on May eleventh,
twenty twenty, that includes a survey of hundreds of long
COVID patients. It's the first of its kind, a patient
(21:00):
lead analysis of the long COVID experience, and this is
just three months or so into the pandemic, so the
results are very preliminary, but they are still shocking. They
find that respondents who haven't recovered have been experiencing symptoms
for an average of forty days, and the chance of
(21:20):
full recovery by day fifty is less than one and
five most weeks, brain fog is more common than coughing
for these COVID patients, and two thirds of them describe
their lives since getting long COVID as sedentary. But this
survey is just an appetizer by July Athena and a
team of long COVID patients SLASH researchers realize this isn't
(21:42):
going away and their symptoms aren't going away. They embark
on a larger study, a global survey of long COVID symptoms.
At that point, I think around more than eight thousand
people on the slack they were sharing experiences, and the
slab group at that point I think had around sixty
different channels dedicated to different symptoms right neurological symptoms, respiratory symptoms,
(22:05):
size intolerance, to productive symptoms, GI issues, valuous things. For
the second survey, they get nearly four thousand long COVID
patients from fifty six countries who speak a bunch of
different languages to fill out a questionnaire. They ask them
to describe their symptoms in detail and the effects the
illness has had in their lives. They release the report
(22:27):
on that survey in July this year, twenty twenty one,
and the results are astonishing. More than ninety percent of
the respondents have not recovered after nine months and are
still suffering at the time of the survey, and more
than eighty five percent of patients still have relapses triggered
by exercise or other stressors. Nearly seventy percent have reduced
(22:48):
their work schedules or stopped working altogether, and almost ninety
percent of patients have cognitive dysfunction or memory issues like
Dave and Athena. Just seeing the numbers like them an
average number of symptoms that long COVID patients had. Out
of these two hundred, the average the number of symptoms
(23:09):
is that more than fifty. Just like seeing that number that,
like one person can experience fifty different symptoms was kind of,
I don't know, shocking, just at the complexity of the
symptom profile. Another thing that we're surprising and interesting and
hopefully we'll give us some queue to understanding the underlying
path of physiology is that these symptoms are not just
(23:32):
like limited to one or two organ system. On average,
out of ten organ systems that we have studied, patients
have symptoms in nine point something. Each patient has problem
in various almost all organ systems that we studied long
COVID is not simply a respiratory illness. Whatever is attacking
(23:54):
these patients is attacking them head to toe. No, I'm
kind of ashamed that it as a scientist that I
really didn't before this whole personal experience, I didn't know
much about other postel complications. Right, So we knew that
like post viral complications exist, but unfortunately they are extremely understudied,
(24:15):
and due to the kind of a scale of the
pandemic this time, all these small bubbles they come to
the surface and now they are just undeniable. Right, we
cannot deny these millions of people now that at the
same time in this past year, that they are developing
various type of conditions due to these post viral complications.
(24:38):
We opened the episode with some major viruses from the
past that cause limited and very understudied post viral complications
Russian flu, Spanish flu, polio. But COVID, because of its
sheer scale and with our ability to look closer at
virus cells than ever before, offers a new opportunity, a
(25:00):
chance to figure out what these post viral complications are,
what causes them. With long COVID, it's still very much
an unknown Athena is not a virologist or an epidemiologist,
but her personal experience has driven her to study long COVID,
all while continuing to recover from her own bout of it.
(25:22):
We spoke in August twenty twenty one and she still
hadn't recovered. So next week will be seventeen months, and
maybe out of the seventeen months, I only had altogether
thirty forty days of normal temperature. My temperature rarely goes
below thirty seven point seven eight, right, so I am
(25:42):
usually above thirty eight, which I think in firenheight would
be like one hundred point two hundred point three. I
asked Athena if she was optimistic or pessimistic about whether
long COVID will be figured out. I really hope that
with the amount of attention and resources that hopefully different countries,
different governments, different organizations are providing, we will understand long COVID,
(26:04):
and unders standing long COVID we will help us to
understand other post viral complications that have been ignored so
far in the medical history. That's my optims. My pessimism
is that unfortunately we are very far from acquiring the
knowledge that we need in order to provide treatment and
(26:25):
cure long COVID. Meanwhile, with the existing trend right now,
the current trend of increasing cases all over the world,
especially due to the dental variant, we are just like
accumulating so many long covides down like in a year,
probably each country will have millions of people, most of
(26:50):
them again previously young and fit that now they're just
like really struggling to go back to semi normal life.
I really don't know what we'll It's a crisis. It's
a health crisis. Even today, Athenis still has relapses if
she pushes herself too hard or sometimes for no reason
(27:11):
at all. And there's also the social side effects of
long COVID. One aspect of long COVID is that you
become a very unreliable person because you are good one
day and then the next day just like kind of
collapse or you become unfunctional. So that unreliability makes planning
very difficult. I have to figure out a way that
(27:32):
whether like these these relapses are going to be with
me for the list of my life, or the relapses
hopefully be resolved as well. That's that's completely unclear right now.
But knowing that during those times that I am not
experiencing brain fog. I know what a valuable, valuable thing
it is, just like to be normal. Many months after
(27:57):
getting sick, Dave Hockaday was still not one hundred percent anytime.
He tried to exercise the way he used to with
relapse and be back in bed. He tried, well, he
tried basically everything. Yeah, gosh, I mean, I'm laughing because
I've never really taken anything in the past. So what
(28:17):
have I tried? Various antibiotics, amongst the sillin penicillin. I've
tried breathing techniques, window breathing, diaphragm breathing. I've tried diaphragm
released techniques, muscle relaxation techniques, vitamin D of cursitin what else? Gosh?
I've tried acupuncture and tried shiatsu. I've tried reiki, I've
tried osteo, I've tried reflexology. I've nearly bankrupted myself trying
(28:42):
trying to get better. None of it really worked, but
he did finally have people who understood what he was
going through. He became a moderator for one of the
bigger long COVID Facebook groups called covid nineteen support and recovery.
He also participated in Athena's Big Survey, but after nearly
a year, he was still really sick. I saw a
(29:05):
lot of people on the social media groups saying, you know,
ten or eleven months, they were starting to feel a
bit better. So I was thinking, great, I maybe come
out of the woods here. And then January and February
kicked in and I had a massive relapse when I
started to get these new symptoms in my stomach, and
I was thinking, this is never going to end. You know,
I'm going to be like this the rest of my life.
(29:27):
A lot of people don't really understand chronic illness. We're
not used to a nonlinear illness. In the West. You
used to seeing people getting going well and then getting better,
and that's just not the case and fair place of
my wife and kids, they've been really understanding throughout this,
but I'm pretty sure there are points at which they
just wanted to say, for God's sake, can you not
(29:47):
just get better? But things did start to get better eventually.
For Dave, it's just been rest and time, taking it
easy and being patient. I mean, it's fair to say
I'm a different person than I was in March last year,
February March last year. I'm optimistic. I'm a half blastful
(30:09):
kind of person. I believe I will get better. I
got no reason to believe otherwise. I think it's just
going to take time. For Athena, a sort of breakthrough
came which took a course of steroids last October, though
she's not really sure that's what helped. But at the
same time, I'm not sure. Maybe they're just a natural
(30:30):
course of recovery, right, just like also a time basically
was another another contribution. However, I still have relapses of
symptoms like for some of those I know the trigger
like activity like I really cannot I cannot do much
of exercise like that active life three times awakened dream.
(30:53):
It's gone for an for now, and whenever I just
like try to go back to that, I crash. It's
unclear if the delta variant currently spreading throughout the world
is going to cause more cases of long COVID or
if the vaccines that work so well at preventing hospitalization
and COVID patients will specifically stop long COVID two. What
(31:14):
is clear is that you do not want to get
long COVID that getting COVID nineteen, no matter your age,
does not necessarily mean you will get through it asymptomatically
or quickly or ever. Study has ranged quite a bit
percentage wise, but a significant number of even really young
children who get COVID, some of whom are initially asymptomatic,
(31:37):
still report lingering symptoms months later, and a study out
of China found that more than two thirds of hospitalized
COVID patients they surveyed had at least one symptom six
months later. One of the most frightening things that long
COVID patients describe are the vivid dreams, the nightmares. I
(31:59):
asked Dave to tell me about his, and the first
one I remember, I think when I was probably coming
down with the infection. It was I was dreaming I
wasn't having a nightmare, that I was lying in bed
and this kind of serpent popped up at the end
of the bed and kind of stared at me, and
I looked at it, and I kind of got a
bit a bit worried about it, and it just disappeared
(32:20):
into my foot and went in between the toes and
started slithering around under my skin, and I could see
it under my skins, slithering around all over my body,
and then it started to multiply and you could see
these snakes under my skin just going all around the
body and in my face and him. I think, you know,
at that point needing my subconscious, my immune system, and
(32:43):
probably informed my subconscious that it was being invaded. And
that's all that to me is the logical explanation. But
I'm no expert on dreams. I've got no idea, but
it was varied for me. I was being invaded. On
the next episode of A long Shot, we'll learn about
human challenge trails where people contract coronavirus on purpose. Long
(33:08):
Shot is a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio.
Today's episode of long Shot was produced, written, and narrated
by me Sean Revive. A co producer is Gabby Watts.
Special thanks to Noah Brown and iHeartRadio and George B.
Stefano at Charles University in prov Executive producers are Virginia Prescott,
(33:28):
Brandon Barr, and ELC. Crowley. Long Shot was scored by
Jason Shannon. The score was mixed by Vic Stafford. Sound
design and audio mix was by Harper Harris with Tunewelders,
(33:49):
School of Humans,
School of Humans. After the Russian flu epidemic in the
early eighteen nineties, some survivors described odd and oddly lingering symptoms.
One of them, the English feminist Josephine Butler, wrote to
a friend, I am so weak that if I read
or write for half an hour, I become so tired
(00:28):
and faint that I have to lie down. That was
more than three months after she'd gotten the flu. Twenty
five years later, just before the start of the Spanish
flu pandemic, the Austrian neurologist Constantine vent Economo described a
series of patients who had unusual and unusually sustained symptoms.
(00:50):
These patients had symptoms that range from meningitis to delirium,
from extreme tiredness to weakness in the hands or feet,
are almost the complete opposite, involuntary twitching and jerking, and insomnia,
and even more unsettling, A lot of these patients died
because so many patients had unbearable exhaustion. Economo named whatever
(01:14):
these patients had and cephalitis lethargica. The disease seemed to
center around Vienna at first, but when the Spanish flu
came and spread throughout the world, the mysterious disease seemed
to follow its footsteps to other parts of Europe and
the United States. It affected at least one hundred thousand
people in Western Europe. Its precise cause and relationship to
(01:35):
the Spanish flu is still a mystery today. Fifteen years later,
in nineteen thirty four, an outbreak of atypical polio struck
one hundred and ninety eight people, most of them doctors
and nurses, at a Los Angeles hospital. The authors of
a paper about this outbreak at LA Hospital wrote that
(01:55):
the polio was so variable that no syndrome can be
described which accurately portrays the clinical picture. Instead of the
more typical symptoms of polio like these patients had all
sorts of other symptoms nausea, vomiting, muscle twitching, constipation, vertigo,
and double vision. Any sort of exercise or exertion caused
(02:15):
them debilitating fatigue. They had trouble sleeping and memory lapses,
and the symptoms lasted. Even six months later, more than
half of the afflicted staff couldn't go back to work,
and more than a decade after that some of the
patients were still suffering. Which is all to say that
long haulers are not unique to COVID nineteen. In fact,
(02:37):
they are not unique even to this coronavirus. Chronic symptoms
have been documented in patients with stars Wan and Mers.
What is unique about long COVID, which is a term
created by patients for patients, is that many millions of
people have it all at once, and these long haulers
are resourceful, driven and speaking aloud about it in unison,
(02:58):
in the news, on social media, and to each other.
The other thing that's unique about long COVID is that
if it's still a mystery and understudied and misunderstood, it's
not being swept completely under the rug. This podcast is
about the history of vaccines, but maybe I don't talk
enough about why we even need vaccines. It's about preventing mortality,
(03:22):
of course, but it's also about preventing morbidity, the suffering
from illness and chronic disease. And that's what we're going
to talk about in this episode about long COVID, or
rather that's what two long COVID patients are going to
tell us about. It's not always pretty or upbeat, but
these conversations will open your eyes. He had another reason
(03:42):
you don't want to get COVID nineteen. Because there's no
guarantee that you'll ever recover from My Heart Radio and
School of Humans. I'm sean review and this is long shot.
(04:03):
Let's just start from the beginning. So when did you
start feeling ill? This started back in February twenty, twenty twenty. Sorry,
that's Dave Hackaday. He's forty eight years old, lives in
Oxford in the UK. He's married with a couple of kids.
He works in humanitarian ed I've worked in war zones,
civil conflict zones, and there's been bombs and shooting around,
(04:25):
so I'm fairly used to crisis and managing anxiety. And
in February twenty twenty he started feeling a little sick,
extremely heavy running nose, which is quite grim. Actually, I've
never had anything like that before, but the usual, you know,
kind of mild fever, aches and pains, feeling a bit
dizzy and a bit unwell, just in bed for a
(04:47):
couple of days. Nothing serious, just a fairly heavy cold
or fever. By the time Dave starts feeling symptoms, he
and his family are already aware of the virus spreading
in China, but there are only a dozen or so
cases in the UK over the following weeks. Novel coronavirus
cases are reported in Japan and Thailand, South Korea, France, Australia, Brazil, India, Egypt,
(05:10):
and Italy. There are tens of thousands of cases in China,
but very low numbers elsewhere in the world. A person
here and there, nothing to cause panic. In Oxford. Dave
continues living his life, but he sees the writing on
the wall and cuts back on some activities. He mostly
works from home borders his groceries online. One of the
few things Dave continues doing like normal is going to
(05:32):
the gym. He's a really active person, likes to do
high intensity interval training and things like that. I was
pretty fair and I had a good diet, no underlying comorbidities.
The only thing I was doing was going to the gym,
and I'd heard about some people started complaining of coughs
and fevers and stuff, so you know, I'm pretty sure
(05:53):
I picked it up from the gym. He gets sick
at the end of February, feels like a pretty bad cold,
but he isn't overly worried. But since he knows about
this coronavirus, he calls one one one, which is direct
line to the National Health Service. Basically, someone in the
UK might call one one one if they're sick, but
it's not really an emergency. They were saying, well, look,
(06:14):
if you haven't got a cough or a high fever,
and you haven't been to China or been with anyone
who's been in Italy, then it probably isn't probably just
a seasonal cold and that's been That was their position
at the time. Even though the NHS is telling Dave
he doesn't have coronavirus, he quarantines himself for a few
days as he recovers. And so what happened after that,
(06:36):
I kind of got a typical virus that kind of
felt better. Within four or five days, I was back
on the bike, you know, cycling around Oxford again, you know,
sort of staying fairly low, not really going anywhere there's
lots of people. The only reason I went out was
to go back to the gym again. Really maybe popped
into the office once or twice. Dave thinks he's in
(06:57):
the clear, even though he doesn't know if he even
had coronavirus. The symptoms are gone, but then it comes
back even harder. Than before. It was actually much the ninth,
that's March the twenty twenty. I was starting to feel
a little bit weird, quite unusual levels of fatigue. And
this isn't just kind of like feeling a bit tired
at the end of the day. It was starting to
(07:19):
feel a bit jet laggy, you know, if you've been
on a long haul flight, maybe really quite a deep,
deep tiredness. Dave thinks maybe he's run down from work,
just needs some time to relax, but the symptimes get
worse and weirder. I remember writing a Skype message to
a work quality around about that time, just saying, God, yeah,
(07:41):
I just I just had a really bad night. I
couldn't sleep, I was having nightmares, couldn't breathe properly. The
worst thing was probably the chest pain and the compression
that gradually each day got slowly worse and worse, and it,
you know, I can describe it as like you know,
having an anvil on your chest, suffocating feeling, and they're
(08:03):
also sharp pain sort of radiating down the left hand
side of my chest and arm, which you know, I'm
a middle aged man, and these warning signs that you
don't ignore, so it's just getting worse each day. And
then of course the fatigue was building, that was getting worse,
and there was just generally feeing, starting to feel really
unwell inflamed hots, getting chills at night time and night sweats, insomnia,
(08:28):
dreadful nightmares. My god, the nightmares were horrific. By this time.
In the UK, schools are closed, restaurants and pubs are closed,
Parliament is closed, even the Church of England is closed.
The entire country is on lockdown as thousands of Brits
have tested positive for COVID nineteen, including Prime Minister Boris
(08:49):
Johnson and Prince Charles. In April twenty twenty, the Queen
gives a rare televised address to the nation. While we
have faced challenges before, this one is different. This time
we join with all nations across the globe in a
common endeavor, using the great advances of science and our
(09:11):
instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed. By then, these
symptoms are scaring the shit out of him. I remember
waking up in a cold sweat, having had a nightmare
that I couldn't actually breathe, And I woke up and
I couldn't actually breathe. It was the most terrifying thing.
This time he calls, like calling nine one in the US.
(09:37):
An ambulance comes to the house. And that was the
first point I kind of realized I was in the
middle of something quite unusual because they did all the
usual vital signs. So they took oxygen, they did blood pressure,
and they took some blood. They took temperatures and they
found nothing. Nothing. They said, you're absolutely you know, as
far as we can see from a triage perspective, there's
(09:59):
nothing wrong with you. Take some paracetamol and go to bed.
What did you think at this point? I thought I
was dying. The problem was Dave didn't know what illness
he had. It was so early in the pandemic in
the UK that getting tested was no easy task. Even
after calling an ambulance and telling the EMTs he feels
(10:21):
like he's going to die, he can't get tested. It's
mind blowing. Yeah, you know a lot of US first
waivers people who came down with it in January February March,
there were no tests available. You had to be dying
or admitted to hospital to have a test. His symptoms
are bad, but not typical COVID nineteen symptoms as they
(10:43):
were known. Then another time, when he calls one one
one this happens. I remember as clear as day. I said, look,
I'm feeling really unwell. I can't breathe properly. I really
I think I need help. And the person says, it's
nothing we can do for you. Our hospitals are full.
If you know, if you're not dying, then there's nothing
we can do about it. I said, well, you know,
how do I know that I'm not dying? And she
(11:04):
and blessed their you know, fair play. He just said,
you know, don't call back unless a your lips tone
blue or be you pass out unconscious. And I remember
just thinking, you know, if I've passed out unconscious, how
can I'll call you. It's not a criticism at all.
It's indicitous of the state of crisis that the country
(11:27):
and many countries were in at that point. We just
did not know what was going on. Dave doesn't know
what to do with a surge of really sick people.
Hospitals in the UK are doing their best to help
coronavirus patients, but Dave doesn't check the normal COVID boxes.
Most patients if they recover, do so within two weeks
(11:51):
or maybe a month if they have a severe case
and need hospitalization. His case is severe, but in a
totally different way. Dave doesn't need a ventilator, and the
thing is he doesn't know what he needs. Nobody does.
I felt really alone, you know. I just thought there's
something wrong with me in my head. Maybe there's some
(12:11):
anxiety in there, you know, I just did not know
what was going on. He keeps a log of his
illness that he eventually turns into a blog. April twenty second,
day forty five. Breathing, restricted, heavy headache, insomnia, anxiety, claustrophobia,
extreme fatigue, pins and needles and weird joint pain, sleep, apnea.
(12:34):
April twenty seventh, day fifty symptoms persist, Call local GP
for advice, request X ray, ECG and blood tests declined.
Signed off work for May April thirtieth night chills and sweats,
extreme fatigue, worsening, cough, fever, and breathlessness. May first woke
up feeling slightly better, first headache free day since late February. Okay,
(12:59):
so at this point he's feeling somewhat hopeful, But then
May second relapse overnight, chess pain returned quite severely, shortness
of breath acute again. Advice from doctor is that this
is recovering COVID nineteen and to readjust recovery expectations from
weeks to months. May sixth, significant improvements and symptoms following
(13:20):
an incredibly deep sleep, one of the deepest night's sleep
I've had in years, like being under anesthetic. May seventh,
day sixty Continued recovery, like coming out from underneath heavy, dusty,
suffocating old rug. May eighth, relapse, But that day, on
May eighth, Dave reads an article by a professor of
(13:42):
infectious diseases in Liverpool who describes his own roller coaster
of unexplainable symptoms, and for the first time, Dave sees
that he's not alone. He starts finding Facebook groups with
thousands of people sharing their unusual and harrowing COVID experiences.
I just stole ban guy, God, I'm not alone, you know.
And then none of this darkness and mine of this
(14:02):
weirdness and quite frankly terrifying experience. I found my people.
What they are going through doesn't even have a name yet.
But on May twenty of twenty twenty. Doctor Elisa Pedigo,
an archaeologist, coins the term long COVID as a hashtag
on Twitter. Dave finds a community of people willing to
(14:23):
take his illness seriously. One of the most mysterious symptoms
that long COVID patients describe as brain fog, and Dave
got it one time. He was in the middle of
a conference call with twenty people and just couldn't remember
(14:45):
what he was supposed to be saying, just at one point,
being in the middle of the sentence and just forgetting,
just forgetting what I was talking about, what we were
talking about, what it was I was supposed to be summarizing,
and I just couldn't, could not remember. And I just thought,
oh my god, there's this big black hole where my
memory should have been and where the decision should have been,
(15:05):
and I just couldn't. I couldn't summon it up. Dave
was really freaked out. And it doesn't even like to
use the term brain fag because it sounds cartoonish. It
sounds kind of quite cute, and what people are witnessing
experiencing is not in any way cute or funny. It's
(15:26):
you know, it's dementia like symptoms, you just forget what
you're doing, you forget words, you forget where you are.
To learn more about brain fag, I turned to someone
who studies brains. So I'm Athena Acrammy and I'm a
neuroscientist at University College London. I have my own lab
studying various aspects of learning memory, specifically related to a
(15:50):
kind of unsupervised learning in human rodents computational models. Athena
has her own lab to study brains, and one of
the best universities on earth to do so. In other words,
she's brilliant. But in March twenty twenty, she gets sick,
and she, like Dave Hockaday and millions of other people,
(16:10):
starts getting weird symptoms that won't go away. At first,
she thinks she has a normal COVID. It sounded as
a bomber, But at the same time I was quiet,
kind of happy, maybe in a sense that Okay, in
a couple of weeks, I will be over it. Really,
I had this mentality, and now that I got it,
it's fine. That's not what happened. Two weeks became three
(16:32):
weeks became four weeks, and my initial symptoms day were
very classic. I had cough and fever and fatigue, shortness
of breath, but then it just slowly slody. New symptoms
started to appear. Her cough is almost resolved after four weeks,
but the new symptoms are bizarre. But I had a
lot of joint pain, kidney pain, shortness of breath, slip
(16:56):
up me pins and needless started to appear. And I
had this kind of a specific extreme episode of sugaring
that it started one day around noon and then continued
until morning the day after. So I was just like
completely paralyzed. I was just like shaking. I was not
sure it is this really? Am I having some seizure? Maybe, well,
(17:18):
what is this? She goes to the hospital, But in
the hospital doctors really didn't know what's going on. What's
wrong with me? Right that he didn't have anything to
comment on except saying that, well, it seems like the
first indications, like taking X ray, chest X ray, it's normal,
you're blood indicators, they're not really that off. So maybe
(17:41):
you're stressed out. Maybe you're just like and I would
just like, you don't know me. I'm not stressed out.
I'm not a person that just I can't easily get
it stressed out. The next time she goes to the
hospital is even worse, and the second time again, I
had another episode of delirium, so I was I had
a really high fever, and I think I went through
(18:02):
a patch of like more than forty eight hours of
no sleep. Even if I was completely dead and tired,
I could not sleep. And then either the insomnia introduced
some kind of induced some delirium and hallucination. You're confused,
you're disconnected, you don't know where you are, you can't
really kind of ground yourself into into reality. And I
(18:23):
had a lot of really weird sleep at me. I said,
up to this point, I still get them. They're just
like whenever I'm like, I just wake up gasping for air.
Right whenever I was just like becoming unconscious falling asleep,
I was just like waking up gasping for air. And
that was really kind of exhausting and scary. I would say,
(18:45):
like Dave, she's very active, she go to the gym
three times a week. Now she can barely take a
walk without crashing and having to spend days in bed,
and the worst part for her is the brain fog
before really kind of learning and hearing about the term
brain fog. I was describing that to my husband as
just like my mom is so cloudy. I can't I
(19:08):
can't access information easily. I just don't remember things that
happened maybe half an hour ago. I used to have
a very sharp memory and that was gone. The obvious
sort of weirdness here is that you know, you're a
brain scientist who's experiencing brain fog. Is, how has that
made you feel? It's a difficult question. I think it
(19:31):
kind of motivates me more to understand it. And I
was pretty scared by it, to be honest, because most
of my contribution to into basically my job is comes
from my active thinking, right, and that was disrupted, and
it was difficult to come in peace with it. Right.
(19:51):
I really wanted to pretend that things are normal. I
wanted to pretend that I can sit on meetings and
just like you know, kind of go on with my
with my science and with my activities as usual. But
they were extremely taxing. Around the same time that Dave
finds the Facebook groups, Athena finds a Slack support group
called body Politic started by journalist Fiona Lowenstein. On body
(20:16):
Politic Athena finds much of the same validation that Dave
finds and the Facebook groups. She isn't exaggerating or just stressed,
and she is far from a loan on one Slack channel.
People are collecting data by the types of symptoms that
long COVID patients like themselves are experiencing. She joins and
starts helping. At this point, we want to just like
(20:39):
try to aggregate data, collect data to understand it. And
that was a kind of a temporary I hope that
offered the group, but that was the beginning of their
really whole journey. They put out a report on May eleventh,
twenty twenty, that includes a survey of hundreds of long
COVID patients. It's the first of its kind, a patient
(21:00):
lead analysis of the long COVID experience, and this is
just three months or so into the pandemic, so the
results are very preliminary, but they are still shocking. They
find that respondents who haven't recovered have been experiencing symptoms
for an average of forty days, and the chance of
(21:20):
full recovery by day fifty is less than one and
five most weeks, brain fog is more common than coughing
for these COVID patients, and two thirds of them describe
their lives since getting long COVID as sedentary. But this
survey is just an appetizer by July Athena and a
team of long COVID patients SLASH researchers realize this isn't
(21:42):
going away and their symptoms aren't going away. They embark
on a larger study, a global survey of long COVID symptoms.
At that point, I think around more than eight thousand
people on the slack they were sharing experiences, and the
slab group at that point I think had around sixty
different channels dedicated to different symptoms right neurological symptoms, respiratory symptoms,
(22:05):
size intolerance, to productive symptoms, GI issues, valuous things. For
the second survey, they get nearly four thousand long COVID
patients from fifty six countries who speak a bunch of
different languages to fill out a questionnaire. They ask them
to describe their symptoms in detail and the effects the
illness has had in their lives. They release the report
(22:27):
on that survey in July this year, twenty twenty one,
and the results are astonishing. More than ninety percent of
the respondents have not recovered after nine months and are
still suffering at the time of the survey, and more
than eighty five percent of patients still have relapses triggered
by exercise or other stressors. Nearly seventy percent have reduced
(22:48):
their work schedules or stopped working altogether, and almost ninety
percent of patients have cognitive dysfunction or memory issues like
Dave and Athena. Just seeing the numbers like them an
average number of symptoms that long COVID patients had. Out
of these two hundred, the average the number of symptoms
(23:09):
is that more than fifty. Just like seeing that number that,
like one person can experience fifty different symptoms was kind of,
I don't know, shocking, just at the complexity of the
symptom profile. Another thing that we're surprising and interesting and
hopefully we'll give us some queue to understanding the underlying
path of physiology is that these symptoms are not just
(23:32):
like limited to one or two organ system. On average,
out of ten organ systems that we have studied, patients
have symptoms in nine point something. Each patient has problem
in various almost all organ systems that we studied long
COVID is not simply a respiratory illness. Whatever is attacking
(23:54):
these patients is attacking them head to toe. No, I'm
kind of ashamed that it as a scientist that I
really didn't before this whole personal experience, I didn't know
much about other postel complications. Right, So we knew that
like post viral complications exist, but unfortunately they are extremely understudied,
(24:15):
and due to the kind of a scale of the
pandemic this time, all these small bubbles they come to
the surface and now they are just undeniable. Right, we
cannot deny these millions of people now that at the
same time in this past year, that they are developing
various type of conditions due to these post viral complications.
(24:38):
We opened the episode with some major viruses from the
past that cause limited and very understudied post viral complications
Russian flu, Spanish flu, polio. But COVID, because of its
sheer scale and with our ability to look closer at
virus cells than ever before, offers a new opportunity, a
(25:00):
chance to figure out what these post viral complications are,
what causes them. With long COVID, it's still very much
an unknown Athena is not a virologist or an epidemiologist,
but her personal experience has driven her to study long COVID,
all while continuing to recover from her own bout of it.
(25:22):
We spoke in August twenty twenty one and she still
hadn't recovered. So next week will be seventeen months, and
maybe out of the seventeen months, I only had altogether
thirty forty days of normal temperature. My temperature rarely goes
below thirty seven point seven eight, right, so I am
(25:42):
usually above thirty eight, which I think in firenheight would
be like one hundred point two hundred point three. I
asked Athena if she was optimistic or pessimistic about whether
long COVID will be figured out. I really hope that
with the amount of attention and resources that hopefully different countries,
different governments, different organizations are providing, we will understand long COVID,
(26:04):
and unders standing long COVID we will help us to
understand other post viral complications that have been ignored so
far in the medical history. That's my optims. My pessimism
is that unfortunately we are very far from acquiring the
knowledge that we need in order to provide treatment and
(26:25):
cure long COVID. Meanwhile, with the existing trend right now,
the current trend of increasing cases all over the world,
especially due to the dental variant, we are just like
accumulating so many long covides down like in a year,
probably each country will have millions of people, most of
(26:50):
them again previously young and fit that now they're just
like really struggling to go back to semi normal life.
I really don't know what we'll It's a crisis. It's
a health crisis. Even today, Athenis still has relapses if
she pushes herself too hard or sometimes for no reason
(27:11):
at all. And there's also the social side effects of
long COVID. One aspect of long COVID is that you
become a very unreliable person because you are good one
day and then the next day just like kind of
collapse or you become unfunctional. So that unreliability makes planning
very difficult. I have to figure out a way that
(27:32):
whether like these these relapses are going to be with
me for the list of my life, or the relapses
hopefully be resolved as well. That's that's completely unclear right now.
But knowing that during those times that I am not
experiencing brain fog. I know what a valuable, valuable thing
it is, just like to be normal. Many months after
(27:57):
getting sick, Dave Hockaday was still not one hundred percent anytime.
He tried to exercise the way he used to with
relapse and be back in bed. He tried, well, he
tried basically everything. Yeah, gosh, I mean, I'm laughing because
I've never really taken anything in the past. So what
(28:17):
have I tried? Various antibiotics, amongst the sillin penicillin. I've
tried breathing techniques, window breathing, diaphragm breathing. I've tried diaphragm
released techniques, muscle relaxation techniques, vitamin D of cursitin what else? Gosh?
I've tried acupuncture and tried shiatsu. I've tried reiki, I've
tried osteo, I've tried reflexology. I've nearly bankrupted myself trying
(28:42):
trying to get better. None of it really worked, but
he did finally have people who understood what he was
going through. He became a moderator for one of the
bigger long COVID Facebook groups called covid nineteen support and recovery.
He also participated in Athena's Big Survey, but after nearly
a year, he was still really sick. I saw a
(29:05):
lot of people on the social media groups saying, you know,
ten or eleven months, they were starting to feel a
bit better. So I was thinking, great, I maybe come
out of the woods here. And then January and February
kicked in and I had a massive relapse when I
started to get these new symptoms in my stomach, and
I was thinking, this is never going to end. You know,
I'm going to be like this the rest of my life.
(29:27):
A lot of people don't really understand chronic illness. We're
not used to a nonlinear illness. In the West. You
used to seeing people getting going well and then getting better,
and that's just not the case and fair place of
my wife and kids, they've been really understanding throughout this,
but I'm pretty sure there are points at which they
just wanted to say, for God's sake, can you not
(29:47):
just get better? But things did start to get better eventually.
For Dave, it's just been rest and time, taking it
easy and being patient. I mean, it's fair to say
I'm a different person than I was in March last year,
February March last year. I'm optimistic. I'm a half blastful
(30:09):
kind of person. I believe I will get better. I
got no reason to believe otherwise. I think it's just
going to take time. For Athena, a sort of breakthrough
came which took a course of steroids last October, though
she's not really sure that's what helped. But at the
same time, I'm not sure. Maybe they're just a natural
(30:30):
course of recovery, right, just like also a time basically
was another another contribution. However, I still have relapses of
symptoms like for some of those I know the trigger
like activity like I really cannot I cannot do much
of exercise like that active life three times awakened dream.
(30:53):
It's gone for an for now, and whenever I just
like try to go back to that, I crash. It's
unclear if the delta variant currently spreading throughout the world
is going to cause more cases of long COVID or
if the vaccines that work so well at preventing hospitalization
and COVID patients will specifically stop long COVID two. What
(31:14):
is clear is that you do not want to get
long COVID that getting COVID nineteen, no matter your age,
does not necessarily mean you will get through it asymptomatically
or quickly or ever. Study has ranged quite a bit
percentage wise, but a significant number of even really young
children who get COVID, some of whom are initially asymptomatic,
(31:37):
still report lingering symptoms months later, and a study out
of China found that more than two thirds of hospitalized
COVID patients they surveyed had at least one symptom six
months later. One of the most frightening things that long
COVID patients describe are the vivid dreams, the nightmares. I
(31:59):
asked Dave to tell me about his, and the first
one I remember, I think when I was probably coming
down with the infection. It was I was dreaming I
wasn't having a nightmare, that I was lying in bed
and this kind of serpent popped up at the end
of the bed and kind of stared at me, and
I looked at it, and I kind of got a
bit a bit worried about it, and it just disappeared
(32:20):
into my foot and went in between the toes and
started slithering around under my skin, and I could see
it under my skins, slithering around all over my body,
and then it started to multiply and you could see
these snakes under my skin just going all around the
body and in my face and him. I think, you know,
at that point needing my subconscious, my immune system, and
(32:43):
probably informed my subconscious that it was being invaded. And
that's all that to me is the logical explanation. But
I'm no expert on dreams. I've got no idea, but
it was varied for me. I was being invaded. On
the next episode of A long Shot, we'll learn about
human challenge trails where people contract coronavirus on purpose. Long
(33:08):
Shot is a production of School of Humans and iHeartRadio.
Today's episode of long Shot was produced, written, and narrated
by me Sean Revive. A co producer is Gabby Watts.
Special thanks to Noah Brown and iHeartRadio and George B.
Stefano at Charles University in prov Executive producers are Virginia Prescott,
(33:28):
Brandon Barr, and ELC. Crowley. Long Shot was scored by
Jason Shannon. The score was mixed by Vic Stafford. Sound
design and audio mix was by Harper Harris with Tunewelders,
(33:49):
School of Humans,
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