Taming post-COVID Syndrome

"It seems like British Columbia is actually leading the country in this particular area, in supporting post-COVID. There are other clinics that are going to pop up, but I think B.C. is doing a pretty good job in terms of having a more structured network."

"They sound like pretty vague symptoms that we all experienced at times, but these have been quite debilitating and affecting people's lives."

"Frustration is probably one of the more common feelings that they experience. They also feel somewhat helpless."

"And that perhaps nobody's really listening to them."

Dr.Euseok Kim, medical director, B.C.'s latest post-COVID-19 recovery clinic, Abbottsford, B.C.

 

"I feel like everybody's doing literally the best that they can right now. But a lot of the things that long-haulers are experiencing, nobody really knows how to treat that."

"When you're living through it, you're just desperate for some kind of relief."

"Once we get through this acute crisis, we're going to have a lot of people who are still grappling with the chronic side of the pandemic. So it's vitally crucial that we do have these COVID care clinics."

"The level of disability for basic life function is pretty major right now. And I don't know when I will regain that. But I'm hopeful with the amount of research and science that is on right now, that we are going to find reasons and answers and treatments."

Katy McLean, 42, Vancouver resident

 

"Everything is piecemeal, and each province to its own. There's no continuity throughout Canada."

"There's not much available. There's one [clinic] in Windsor, there's one in London, but it becomes all so confusing. You have to hunt them down."

"It's moving in the right direction, but it's not going nearly as quickly as it needs to."

Susie Goulding, long-COVID victim, Oakville, Ontario

Dr. Angela Cheung is a senior clinician-scientist at University Health Network and is co-lead investigator on a study looking at one-year outcomes of COVID-19 patients. She says governments need to start thinking about the long-term impact of the pandemic. (University Health Network)

The most common symptoms that clinic patients present with are fatigue, brain fog, anxiety and depression. There are those among people who had undergone severe COVID cases, who suffer as well from organ dysfunction. The Abbotsford clinic that Dr. Kim operates has just recently opened. His colleagues, however, who work out of other clinics inform him that it is their experience that most patients begin showing signs of improvement following six to nine months of post-COVID recovery therapy.

 

 In British Columbia where COVID case numbers soared through the winter and following spring months, demand for post-COVID recovery clinics understandably increased. Two such clinics now operate in Vancouver, and one in each Surrey and Abbotsford, southeast of Vancouver. Those two are located in the Fraser Health Authority which happens to represent the hardest-hit area of the province.

 

An estimated ten percent -- more than 14,000 of the 142,700 people in British Columbia who were infected with the coronavirus -- were plagued with persistent symptoms. International studies put the number of COVID patients struggling with lingering symptoms of illness, from ten percent to close to one-third and up to as high numbers as three-quarters of those stricken with COVID, still suffering from post-COVID long-haul syndrome.

 

The first of the province's four post-COVID clinics, despite the expectation of numbers has dealt with fewer than 700 patients thus far. Katy McLean, one among the 700 patients, appreciates the screening tests given her at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, and for the medical specialists and therapists whom she was referred to and who assisted in her recovery. She still questions the lack of services and resources devoted to the ongoing problems associated with COVID recovery, and people like her for whom that recovery has been prolonged.

 

Dr. Seema Marwaha, a general internal medicine specialist at Unity Health in Toronto, says the emergence of long-haul COVID-19 has exposed weaknesses in the health-care system when it comes to treating chronic conditions. (Supplied by Seema Marwaha)

Oakville, Ontario resident Susie Goulding has been coping with long-COVID for over  year in the face of too few publicly funded clinics operating in the Toronto area apart from the University Health Network services. She thinks in terms of a badly needed series of dedicated post-COVID clinics with the expertise to help sufferers and guide them toward a COVID-symptom-free future so they can resume their former lives, unhampered by symptoms that continue to incapacitate them.

 

She attends a private brain injury clinic outside the paid auspices of the universal health care system where her COVID symptoms, primarily neurological in nature, like crippling brain fog are treated. Memory loss, confusion and difficulty in focusing on a task all exemplify brain fog at its most frustratingly difficult. Although there are three post-COVID recovery clinics in Montreal, Sherbrooke and Chicoutimi, and Edmonton and Calgary operate several, the rest of the country hasn't seen fit to open such public medical clinics.

 

Petitions have been presented by several Members of Parliament urging the federal government to formally recognize long-COVID as a health syndrome requiring the establishment of countrywide clinics to address medical, rehabilitation and employment issues. The petitioners point out that "tens of thousands of Canadians" suffer from serious long-term symptoms affecting health, employment and day-to-day life. 

 

Before contracting COVID-19 in March 2020, Sonja Mally could hike for 10 hours. Now that she suffers debilitating symptoms as a COVID-19 'long-hauler,' she has spent months training her body to tolerate two-kilometre walks near her home. (Sam Nar/CBC)