The Tyee has published my article Why the Pandemic Will Be a Long, Long Haul. Excerpt:
When a new disease emerges — SARS, Ebola, COVID-19 — we very rapidly go from total ignorance to knowing quite a lot. A virus or bacteria comes out of nowhere, people get sick and die, and suddenly we have the bug’s whole genome. Research articles on symptoms and therapies, some of them useful, flood the internet. We feel well armed for a swift response.
But the more we learn, the more we discover how little we really know.
Nine months after rumours of a SARS-like pneumonia began to leak out of Wuhan, we now know the SARS-CoV-2 virus seems able to attack almost anywhere in the body, not just the lungs. Some of the attacks are rare but truly horrible, but the worst may be the attacks that don’t stop when the virus is gone.
Doctors call these attacks “sequelae,” and they can be trivial or lifelong chronic disabilities. After the West African Ebola outbreak, researchers found many survivors suffered from eye inflammation, headache, fatigue, muscle pain, joint pain and memory loss. Ebola virus was still in some men’s semen 40 months after they’d recovered.
Similarly, some COVID-19 survivors may have lifelong souvenirs of their experience. Such survivors call the problem “long COVID,” and call themselves “long-haulers.”
