My ‘Long Covid’ Nightmare: Still Sick After 6 Months

Since March, research studies and treatment centers had been popping up across the country to help unravel Covid’s long-term mystery.

One of those is at the University of California, San Francisco. There, Michael Peluso, an infectious-diseases doctor and co-principal investigator of a study of Covid’s long-term impact, and his team have been interviewing about 250 Covid-19 survivors since April. In early interviews with subjects, Peluso told me recently, he would tick off a list of possible symptoms from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He quickly found out that some people’s symptoms diverged from the C.D.C.’s initial list. Patients described phantom smells, like burning cigarettes or burned meat, he said. Others complained about low blood pressure that resulted in fainting. “I never knew what people were going to say,” he said. “People would periodically have heart palpitations or shortness of breath out of nowhere.” Peluso said he and his team were the first point of contact many participants had with a doctor since they got sick. “It highlighted the challenge of access to good health care in America,” he said.

He said it was too early to draw conclusions about how to prevent or treat long Covid. Some researchers are exploring the vascular system, including abnormal blood clotting. “If scientists can understand the biological process, we can hopefully devise a way to treat it,” he said. Some study participants, he said, began to feel better only eight months after the first diagnosis. “The hard part is there is not a standard answer for everybody,” Peluso said, adding that “it will take a while for us to understand what we have collectively been through.”