One day, suddenly, Hannah Davis was unable to read her last text message. The bubble of words on her bright phone screen looked at her again as her eyes and mind tried and failed to adjust and react. It was his first clue that something was wrong; then came the fever, the headaches, the muscle pain, the tremors.
It was late March 2020. For Davis, it has been a year of brain fog, no heart rate, phantom odors and so bad memory loss that he initially feared having some degenerative condition.
Its “long journey” COVID-19 has manifested itself primarily in neurological problems that, over time, have worsened.
“I still have what I feel like a 48-hour memory,” Davis, 33, told ABC News.
When she was a young woman studying machine learning and artificial intelligence, thinking critically is a big part of her life, making dealing with persistent, often debilitating symptoms even more difficult.
During the day, he often has “difficulty finding words” when trying to express an idea. But this is just the beginning.
“At first I woke up with my arms totally asleep and no feeling in them,” he said. “I’ve had phantom odors, tremors … In addition to coughing and shortness of breath, and everything on the CDC’s symptom list, there was just this whole other category.”
What was once understood as a respiratory virus has now emerged, for many, as a total attack on the system.
A new study is now exploring what Davis and many other long-haul carriers have long felt: COVID-19 can have long-term impacts on the body and brain.
Expert-reviewed research from Northwestern University School of Medicine published Tuesday surveyed 100 patients from 21 states and found that 85% of participants experienced four or more neurological symptoms, more than six weeks after becoming infected, and even if the disease was not severe enough to require hospitalization.
Problems reported included brain fog, fatigue, dizziness, joint and muscle pain, headaches, numbness, and tingling.
Half of the patients surveyed did not have confirmed tests for COVID-19, a limitation of the study caused by poor diagnostic tools during the early days of the pandemic, when people who wanted to get a test could not always get one.
In December, the Patient-Led Research Collaborative published a study (which Davis helped write) on long-term emerging symptoms.
Although not yet peer-reviewed, it points to a clear pattern: in addition to 3,700 self-described truckers in 56 countries, more than 85% reported experiencing brain fog and cognitive dysfunction.
Some of the most common symptoms among them were poor attention or concentration, difficulty thinking, difficulty functioning executive, and slowed thoughts.
Even seven months after the first infection, more than half of respondents experienced memory problems and recovery problems.
Headaches, insomnia, dizziness, neuralgia, neuropsychiatric changes, tremors, sensitivity to noise and light, phantom odors, tinnitus, and other sensorimotor symptoms were also common among respondents.
A peer-reviewed study by the Survivor Corps, in collaboration with Indiana University, Irvine University of California and the Mayo Clinic, was released Tuesday. It surveyed more than 5,000 self-reported long-haul carriers recruited from COVID-19 online support groups and found that more than half of respondents had prolonged difficulty concentrating and more than a third had long-term memory problems. term and dizziness.
Laura Gross, 72, tested positive for the virus in April 2020. Her unavoidable brain fog ravaged her for months. He describes her as trapped in a “cyclone.”
“We have all these folders in our heads, just like a computer, and we all know intuitively how to go through them directly and connect them immediately,” Gross said. “COVID makes it explode and makes it swirl around.”
“It broke my heart,” Gross continued. “It broke me to the point that I wasn’t who I was and couldn’t find me. It’s horrible not to be who you are.”
In February, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the launch of its four-year, $ 1.15 billion initiative to study what causes long-term COVID symptoms. Its aim is to identify the long-term root cause of COVID-19 and, eventually, the means of treatment.
“The damage caused by COVID seems to have literally no limits,” said Survivor Corps founder Diana Berrent. “All organs are vulnerable, including the brain, and we need to begin to understand the long-term mechanisms of COVID so that we can offer a path to the recovery of the millions of people who suffer.”
Davis says dealing with his symptoms has been a daunting feat.
“It’s scary,” he said. “But I’d rather look for answers than wait.”
Sony Salzman and Eric M. Strauss of ABC News contributed to this report.