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By Claire Cleveland, Colorado Public Radio In the early hours of an April morning, at her home in Erie, Malea Anderson woke up with what felt like an explosion of ice water up her spine and into her head. She had a massive headache and tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, but her limbs wouldn’t cooperate. She feared she was having a stroke. Her partner, Randy, took her to the emergency room. The doctor suspected she had COVID-19, but she couldn’t get a test. At the hospital, the 53-year-old had a brain scan that came back normal — no stroke. She was sent home from the hospital, again. It was her second visit to the emergency room in a matter of weeks and third since March. She’d had countless telehealth appointments with various primary care physicians, seen specialists and started taking supplements like vitamin D and zinc to help with her long list of symptoms: fatigue, brain fog, exhaustion, headaches, vertigo, shortness of breath, chest pain, muscle aches. COVID-19 IN COLORADO The latest from the coronavirus outbreak in Colorado: MAP: Known cases in Colorado. TESTING : Here’s where to find a community testing site. The state is now encouraging anyone with symptoms to get tested. STORY: CU Boulder switches to remote learning for at least two weeks amid coronavirus surge FULL COVERAGE Some days she feels like she might be getting better. Then she crashes again. “I got to where I could walk and function and maybe go make dinner. So I would get up, I would make coffee. And that would determine how the day went,” Anderson told Colorado Public Radio. “Most days I would come back to bed. If I could plan meals for my family, that would be a good day. And then outside of that, I was in bed.” Anderson isn’t alone. A Facebook group called Survivor Corps for those who describe themselves as “long haulers” has just over 102,000 members. While the World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of COVID-19 infections “are mild or asymptomatic,” and patients recover after two weeks, those who are still suffering question the notion of a “mild” case. In Colorado, dozens of people report a wide range of lingering symptoms including shortness of breath, elevated heart rate, fatigue and malaise, headaches, gastrointestinal issues, body aches, brain fog and more. “I call it the trifecta. I have fatigue, insomnia and exhaustion,” said Cindy Maetzold, who lives in Snowmass. “But when I say fatigue, I’ll go for a walk, and I’ll come back and I just sit down, do nothing. It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I don’t have the energy to do anything.” Studies show COVID-19 symptoms can linger, but much is still unknown It’s not clear how many people have had lingering symptoms, and how many moving forward will. In a multistate phone survey of adults who tested positive for the virus, 35 percent had not returned to their pre-Covid-19 health 2 to 3 weeks after their test, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A small study out of Italy that surveyed 179 patients, found that 87 percent of patients who were hospitalized still had symptoms 60 days after they started feeling sick. A small study in Germany found that 78 percent of COVID-19 patients had lingering heart problems two to three months out. In Colorado Springs, Dr. Robert Lam and his medical students started surveying patients with COVID-19 after they left the hospital. The survey asks about mental, physical and financial health. Initially, the mental implications of isolation and loneliness stood out, until they started to notice some patients just weren’t recovering. “Our initial results showed that up to a fourth of patients were still having lingering symptoms of COVID. And so that was something that we didn’t expect,” Lam said. “We are starting to see hints and concerns that there is probably some potential long term lung damage as we’re not seeing patients recover completely.” Lam’s patient population spent time in the hospital, so their long-term impacts will likely be different from those of people like Anderson who were never admitted, never on a ventilator and never treated for COVID-19. To complicate matters even more, many patients like Anderson weren’t able to get a PCR test while they were sick because of a lack of tests in the early months of the pandemic. It further distorts the picture of how many people have contracted the virus, and of those, how many st…
