THE PERILS OF LONG COVID
IN the beginning of April, Covid came knocking for the Bhatias, a family of five, who live in Bengaluru’s Banaswadi neighbourhood. The second wave had yet to assume its brutal proportions; most of the family, including two teenagers aged 18 and 17, got away with cold and fever, their recovery made easier with a five-day course of antibiotics and vitamin supplements. Only their 70-year-old grandmother had to be given steroids, to douse the internal inflammation.
Relieved that they had survived the worst, the Bhatias resumed their normal routine as soon as the symptoms subsided—only to have the nightmare return in two weeks. “My mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s,” says Abhishek Bhatia, 45, a manager at a software engineering firm. “A blood clot had possibly travelled to her brain. She hadn’t been given anti-coagulants during treatment.” Chronic fatigue and bodyache prevented his wife from resuming her duties in the kitchen. The children complained of ‘brain fog’, unable to focus or think clearly. Bhatia himself reported low-grade fever for six days after he tested negative, indicating internal inflammation, and was later found to have blood clots in one hand. “It has been two months since we tested negative, but none of us has the energy to live like we used to,” he says.
The unpredictability of Covid symptoms continues to baffle experts and patients alike. In general, such symptoms include body or muscle ache, fatigue, headache, loss of smell or taste and breathlessness. Over the past year and a half, enough data has been collected to confirm that a majority of Covid survivors experience one or more of these symptoms even after 14 days (the average time it takes for the body to fight off the virus). Of the 9,751 patients it surveyed worldwide in May 2021, the Stanford University School of Medicine found that 70 per cent of those who had suffered moderate or severe infection reported 84 different symptoms months after recovery.
The situation isn’t any better for those with mild symptoms. A study by the , or , in Sweden in May 2021 showed that one out of 10 people with mild Covid infection was unable to fully resume their normal daily activities even eight months after recovery. On an average, patients experienced
