Syracuse, N.Y. – Shanica Echols was discharged from the hospital last spring after a two-week stay with Covid-19.
A year later, she still suffers lingering symptoms. She still gets winded on the stairs in her two-story house.
“I get exhausted climbing the steps,” said Echols, a traveling nurse. “I’ll climb the steps and then sit down in my room for a little bit before I do what I came upstairs to do.”
Greg Jenkins’s eyes water when he slices an onion. But he can’t smell it. Eight months after being diagnosed with Covid-19, Jenkins still has diminished taste and smell. He, too, has a hard time climbing the stairs. A singer, he’s had to relearn songs, inserting more breaths into his phrasing.
“I get short of breath really easy. I get fatigued really easy. My muscles just ache horribly,” said Jenkins, 58. “My sense of smell is shot. Once in a while I smell something, but I can’t tell what it is.
“I’m a long hauler.”
Potentially millions of Americans are long haulers like Echols and Jenkins. Six or more months after they became sick with Covid-19, they suffer the effects of “long covid,” with lingering symptoms such as shortness of breath, racing or irregular heart beats, fatigue, loss of sense of smell, and one of the most common and confounding symptoms, short-term memory lost labeled “brain fog.”