What do we know about the “long Covid”, these patients who have been going through hell for several months?

They are called the “long Covid”. These patients contracted the coronavirus sometime nine months ago and are still suffering. While doctors didn’t initially take them seriously, a study by the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris estimates that they represent up to 30% of patients. Patients who suffer, always in jerks, from overwhelming fatigue, neurological disorders or intense cough, despite being infected in March. Among them, Alice, met by Europe 1, is going through a real ordeal.

“It’s so painful we can’t sleep on it”

“The fatigue is overwhelming, really,” says this 47-year-old former marathoner who ran up to 60 kilometers a week. “I relapse if I do too much activity. It is respiratory distress, skin pain and inflammation. It is so painful that you can’t sleep.” Months after the infection, Alice therefore needs, in addition to her general practitioner, to be followed by “a dermatologist, a pulmonologist, an endocrinologist” and even a gynecologist. Because the coronavirus has caused in its “hallucinating hormonal upheavals”. The former athlete also had to be operated on two weeks ago “from this place”.

A “physical disorder” then, but also a psychological suffering: “you have the impression of being imprisoned in a body that you no longer recognize. This creates a lot of pain, moments of loneliness and above all it is stressful. To have pain”. A suffering that Alice has been living daily for eight months now.

A phenomenon that affects patients with a mild form in the spring

To understand why patients like Alice have been suffering martyrdom for months, a team from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris conducted a study on 70 of these patients. And the caregivers were able in particular to draw a robotic portrait of the “long Covid”: they are generally young people, mainly women, who have contracted a mild form of the virus, therefore without going to hospital. But months after their infection, they continue to experience three types of symptoms.

“Before, an often overwhelming fatigue, which sometimes forced them to stop their work again when they had resumed it”, Professor Dominique Salmon-Céron, who coordinated the study, points out into the microphone of Europa 1. “Then we have neurological signs of concentration problems, memory problems, even headaches. Finally, we have cardiothoracic signs, ie cough, pain, heart rate changes.” Symptoms sometimes add to a new loss of smell, digestive problems, or skin problems.

Causes still unclear and a virus still present in the body

If the typical profile of a “long Covid” is therefore relatively precise, the causes of the duration of the symptoms are still rather unclear. The researchers are still in the hypothesis stage, but the study found that 10 percent of the 70 patients still had the virus in their nasal secretions four months after infection. Evidence that Covid can last for several weeks in the body. For 90% of the other patients, healthcare professionals are trying to determine if the coronavirus might have survived elsewhere in the body.

But these traces are not the only ones, far from it: possible reinfection, fertile genetic ground for Covid-19 … research continues to understand the phenomenon and, good, put an end to this. In this period the health authorities are also starting to study the case of the “long Covid”, but this time to develop better support for these patients and also to recognize them as such.

For their part, some “long Covid” have not waited to reorganize. Thus the “AprèsJ20 Covid-long en France” association was born last October, an association that aims to unite and better inform patients and their families about this long form of coronavirus. The association is also working on the creation of a multidisciplinary care path.