Some Coronavirus Patients Are Reporting Symptoms That Last Months. Nobody Knows Exactly How to Treat Them

Kayla Brim laughed when she learned it could take 10 days to get her COVID-19 test results back. “I thought, ‘Okay, well, within 10 days I should be fine,’” she remembers. That was on July 2. More than a month later, Brim is still far from fine…

[With] COVID-19, it’s not just the sickest who face a long road back. A July 24 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that, out of about 300 non-hospitalized but symptomatic COVID-19 patients, 35% were still experiencing symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath and fatigue up to three weeks after diagnosis. (By contrast, more than 90% of non-hospitalized influenza patients fully recover within two weeks.) Recovery from COVID-19 can be a drawn-out process for patients of all ages, genders and prior levels of health, “potentially leading to prolonged absence from work, studies, or other activities,” the report noted.

The CDC’s surveyors only checked up on people a few weeks after they tested positive for coronavirus, but emerging evidence suggests a large subset of patients are sick for months, not just weeks, on end. Dr. Michael Peluso, who is studying long-term COVID-19 outcomes at the University of California, San Francisco, says about 20% of his research participants are still sick between one and four months after diagnosis.