A 34-year-old woman who contracted long COVID in April 2022 described the condition’s devastating impact: she was forced to move back in with her parents, retired from her dream career as a literary agent and lecturer at the University of Minnesota, and had to cash out her retirement savings to cover medical expenses. She wakes up every day so nauseated that even the smell of food can make her vomit, must stretch for an hour before she can fully move her body, and needs 10-12 hours of sleep or her brain and muscles become too depleted to manage anything beyond basic survival tasks.
The condition affects more than 200 possible symptoms, with most long-COVID patients exhibiting only a handful. The cumulative effect creates a domino effect where one internal system’s dysregulation causes others to fall out of sync, making the condition unpredictably difficult to treat, prevent, or even diagnose. She now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and makes monthly four-hour drives to Chapel Hill for rehabilitation clinic appointments at the university’s specified long COVID clinic.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s center for infectious disease research and policy, highlighted the difficulty in collecting research on a disease that’s so societally charged. The biggest challenges involve keeping people informed during a time of rampant misinformation and politicization, and helping people recognize their symptoms when federal research funding has been rolled back. Dr. Lisa Sanders, medical director of Yale’s long COVID multidisciplinary care center, emphasized that for some patients, long COVID doesn’t resolve—it hardens into myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) or other severe conditions.
The patient has managed her condition through low-level activity in the form of cardiac physical therapy, supplemented with buoyancy-assisted swimming—about two laps using a kickboard twice a week. This regimen has allowed her to become scuba certified, an achievement she could only accomplish with her medical and dive teams. Despite her struggles, she emphasized that there is a way to live with long COVID, but no one gets there alone.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/18/long-covid-symptoms-treatment