More than half reported that they were emotionally affected by their health conditions two months into recovery, and 33% reported seeking mental health care because of it.Ībout 40% reported they couldn't return to work within two months of being discharged from the hospital because they weren't well enough or had lost their jobs.
"I think the part that really affected me the most was just the whole devastation post COVID, which was around not being able to get back to work, for example, because of physical ailments, not being able to really do the things they needed to do for their daily living, like breathing and going to the bathroom and cleaning up the house and going grocery shopping because of persistent weakness, irritability or fatigue overall," Chopra said. Thirty-nine percent reported persistent health problems that kept them from doing normal activities and 12% said they couldn't even do basic things to care for themselves.
Another 7% died within two months of being discharged and 15% had to be re-admitted to a hospital for ongoing health problems.Īmong the 488 survivors who participated in the follow-up surveys in the MI-COVID19 Initiative registry two months after they were discharged, the number who said they were back to normal and free of lingering health effects was "vanishingly small," said Chopra, who is chief of hospital medicine at Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan. "It was sobering" to see the outcome of the study of 1,648 patients treated at 38 Michigan hospitals from March to early July, said Dr. New research published in November in the Annals of Internal Medicine provides evidence that COVID-19 does have a long-term impact for some people. it's going to get me because I'm going to let my guard down and close my eyes and go to sleep, and it's going to come and kill me in my sleep," Vettese said. "I would lay down at night and I would feel like. She has post-traumatic stress disorder, too, re-living what it felt like when the virus had her in its grips. "I've described it as like almost feeling kind of like a bubble around your head, like something that needs to pop so you can get connected with reality." But post-COVID, "I couldn't finish my work. I couldn't finish my quizzes. "Timed online tests and quizzes aren't new to me and I'm not a slow learner and I'm not a slow test taker," Vettese said. She's working toward a bachelor's degree, but said the brain fog and cognitive changes are so pronounced, it's been hard to get the straight-A's she used to have. "If I'm sitting in complete quiet, it dominates." Now, she leaves the television on low most of the time "to try to muffle the sounds in my head," she said. An incessant ringing in Vettese's ears replaced the headache, and that still hasn't gone away. you just feel so bad that it just didn't matter.' "īut when Easter Sunday dawned, Vettese said the headache vanished. At that point, I almost didn't even care if I died because it just hurt, and. "I was worried about blood clots because I couldn't move. I'm going to have an embolism,' " she said. "I would just sit here and I would be thinking, 'My brain is gonna blow. She had a debilitating headache, fever, and body pain. Research now suggests that although SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory virus, it can cause inflammation and changes to the vascular system that can injure blood vessels and lead to blood clots and organ damage. Those who survive COVID-19 are often left with puzzling and sometimes debilitating conditions months after they are considered recovered from the infectious part of the disease.
They're what's come to be known as long-haulers in a pandemic that's killing about 2,500 Americans a day as case numbers soar from coast to coast. It doesn't mean life is back to the way it was before the virus struck.įor 56-year-old Vettese and a growing number of other survivors, nothing about life post-COVID is normal. She managed to survive the virus, and is now among the nearly 200,000 Michiganders considered recovered so far in the coronavirus pandemic.īut the only criteria to be included in the state's recovery statistics is to be alive 30 days after symptoms began. Gloria Vettese of Warren is haunted by the terror she felt in late March and early April, when she lay awake night after night, waiting and wondering whether COVID-19 would kill her and make her only child an orphan.