Via Pública: Poor smell, fatigue, neurological damage: Patients with COVID-19 sequelae can't get treatment at SUS. Excerpt from the Google translation:
“This virus took away my basic functioning, my memory, my communication, it took away my right to smell my children, to be able to taste my favorite food”, said Natália Spinelli, speech therapist and director of a child rehabilitation clinic, in a Facebook group that brings together patients with possible Covid sequelae.
Natália, from Recife, Pernambuco, began to experience the symptoms of coronavirus infection on May 18 and, when the disease was cured, she thought the worst was over. But other effects started to appear: tiredness, cold sweat, body pain, “indescribable” fatigue.
“I started to forget very simple things about work, online classes, my kids. The moment came when I had to register something online and the CPF and RG, which is something totally memorized, and I didn't remember it anymore. ” For her, "the post was infinitely worse than the days I was [with the disease]".
In addition to Natália, Francisca Benedita was also not fully cured after the acute phase of the disease - the active infection - passed. Francisca, who is 45 years old and lives in Fortaleza, Ceará, was hospitalized for 60 days in the ICU; 22 of these passed intubated, with the aid of invasive mechanical ventilation.
Today, four months after discharge, she deals with “a lot of headache, dizziness, lack of taste”.
“There are days when I feel the house is rotten, but it is my nose that is rotten, because I call people to come and nobody is feeling anything”, he describes. After Covid, she started to have weakness, high blood pressure, thyroid problem, as well as pulmonary sequelae. Today, he does private monitoring: "Either you die or you have money to pay for the consequences", he concludes.
Natália and Francisca Benedita are two of the more than 5 million Brazilians cured of coronavirus until November 5, 2020 - after more than seven months of pandemic and 161 thousand deaths registered in Brazil. This number, 5.06 million recovered , appears prominently on the website of the Ministry of Health (MS) and on social networks of the federal government. However, reports from people who have had Covid and studies indicate that the consequences of the infection do not end when the virus is defeated by the body.
One of the pioneering studies on the subject, from the Hospital Policlínico Universitário Agostino Gemelli, in Rome, Italy, indicated in July that only 12.6% of the participants did not show persistent symptoms after the cure. Of the remainder, 32% had one or two symptoms and 55%, more than three. The most persistent sequelae were fatigue (53.1%), difficulty breathing or dyspnoea (43.4%), joint pain (27.3%) and chest pain (21.7%).
The Public Agency talked to people who are experiencing these sequelae and to specialists and found that, even after Covid-19, patients face difficulties in accessing SUS and distrust on the part of family, friends and doctors themselves.
Patients are advised to “seek a psychologist”
“I have to learn to live with the headache that doesn't go away”, says Raphaela Fagundes, who is 35 years old and is an application driver in Bauru, in the interior of São Paulo. She and her nephew began to experience Covid's symptoms - tiredness, exhaustion, fever and headache - on September 18.
They were medicated with chloroquine , azithromycin, prednisone, dipyrone and ivermectin, and 14 days later, following the cycle of the disease, their tests were negative, indicating that they were "cured".
But the pains persisted. "The drugs that were giving me morphine, cortisone were not taking the pain away," said the driver.
