Laurens County resident Deatric Jones was at work remodeling houses in October 2020 when he came down with what he thought was a sinus infection.
By the time he got home that night, he could barely breathe. His neighbor called an ambulance to take him to the ER, where the doctor diagnosed him with COVID-19.
“He told me I was in pretty bad shape,” Jones told the Greenville Journal. “He said, ‘I’m going to put you to sleep.’ The next time I woke up, it was around Thanksgiving.”
Jones, 47, had been placed on a ventilator to help him breathe. During that two-month hospital stay, he says, he flat-lined twice. But he survived.
Symptoms linger
Now more than a year later, Jones has what researchers call Long COVID syndrome — he still needs oxygen 80% of the time, he coughs a lot and has heart problems, too.
While it’s still a developing field of understanding, Long COVID syndrome generally refers to a cluster of symptoms that COVID patients experience four weeks or more after they’ve had acute COVID, said Dr. Chris Sine, a pulmonologist and critical care physician with Bon Secours St. Francis Health System.
Symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, chest discomfort, cough, headache, sweating, brain fog, dizziness, poor appetite, persistent loss of smell or taste, anxiety and depression, he said.
Research shows that about a third of patients, even outpatients with mild disease, develop prolonged symptoms with a slow recovery, Sine said.
Most of these patients will have the highest severity of illness within four weeks of acute illness and slowly improve over two to three months and sometimes longer, even up to a year, which is more common for those hospitalized with more severe disease.
“It’s common for people to have symptoms for two to three months,” he said. “But it can take a long, long time for some people.”
There are also patients who develop complications such as a pulmonary embolism or pneumonia four to six weeks into illness and have risk for rehospitalization, he said.
COVID: ‘Learning as we go’
“The prevalence is a lot larger than we thought initially,” said Dr. Katherine Gettys, an internist and vice chair of primary care with Prisma Health. She said even people who were not very sick or even realized they were sick are turning up with Long COVID symptoms.
“Like everything COVID,” she said, “we are learning as we go.”
Another subset of patients who were severely ill and in the ICU on a ventilator for weeks or months can go on to develop cognitive, psychiatric and physical impairments, Sine said. While it can happen with any long-term hospitalization, the incidence has been higher with COVID patients, he said.
“We’re going to see a number of people … after COVID who will have long-term disability,” said Sine. “There are a lot of unknowns still out there on what we’re going to see.”
There’s also a risk of having to go back into the hospital after about two months among some patients, he said.
Gettys said the mental health effects have been noteworthy, pointing to a study that revealed 22% of patients who were in the ICU suffered anxiety and depression at three months out, which is higher than the rate for similar illnesses like sepsis, she said.
“With COVID” she said, “there’s no organ left behind.”
The human toll
Long COVID takes a toll on lifestyle as well, said Gettys, such as long periods out of work, reduced work requirements for those with physical jobs, and limits on activities — even for young patients.
“The scope is so vast,” she said. “We all think of the patient on oxygen struggling to breathe, but even patients who had mild illness and used to run 10Ks are struggling to take their dogs for a walk.”
After he was released from the hospital, Jones said he needed weeks of rehab to help him walk and talk again.
“I was still in bad shape when I got out. I didn’t know who people were,” he said. “It’s been rough.” Before COVID, Jones, a father of three, had been healthy all his life, playing basketball, softball, golf and running, even coaching youth basketball, he said. Now he can’t do any of those things. He hasn’t been able to return to work yet, either.
He said it’s hard to talk for long periods of time, he’s always tired and susceptible to colds or other infections, and still has problems with memory.
“Last Saturday, I was driving and had to pull over,” he said recently. “My heart kept … beating real fast because I was not getting enough oxygen.” He wound up in the ER.
Prevention is key
Jones got sick before there was a vaccine, but has since gotten the shots and said he’ll do whatever he can to convince others to do the same “because (COVID) is no joke.”
Some 90% of hospitalized patients are unvaccinated, said Sine, noting that vaccination reduces the risk of having symptomatic COVID and hospitalization by 90-95%.
“If we get our vaccination numbers way up,” he said, “we will reduce the risk of getting infections … and the likelihood of having Long COVID.”
“The best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID,” added Gettys, “and the best way to do that is to take measures, like getting vaccinated.”
She recommended that anyone suffering Long COVID symptoms see their doctor.
“There may be people out there who don’t realize what they’re experiencing is Long COVID, thinking that they’re just depressed or never got their energy back,” she said. “Even if we don’t have a clear algorithm for how to approach it … there may be things we can do to help them.”
Jones said he has good days and bad but believes he’s slowly improving. While no one can tell him when he’ll fully recover because it’s such a new disease, he said he’s “just glad to be alive.”
“When I was in the ICU, there were four others in there with me,” he said. “I was the only one who made it out.”
