In its third year, COVID-19 less deadly, still puzzling Even as the virus is claiming fewer lives, as many as three in 10 people who were infected are suffering from lingering ailments – just one of the mysteries medical professionals are trying to understand
By CHRIS BURRITT NW GUILFORD – Less than a week after his COVID-19 diagnosis in early 2021, Oak Ridge pastor Steve Roberson was headed to the hospital where he nearly died. Looking back, Roberson, 72, said the 31 days he spent in the hospital – including six on life support – remain a blur. A year and a half later, he still occasionally suffers from shortness of breath and a lack of agility when he walks. Even so, he said his survival was a blessing. Three friends who were pastors died from the virus. “The doctor said ‘it will be a long, drawn-out process. You’ve got to plow through it,’” Roberson, pastor of Union Grove Baptist Church, said in an interview earlier this month. After returning home from the hospital, Roberson ate pureed food until he was able to swallow again. He was so weak, he needed help standing up. Even though he’s returned to the pulpit, he wondered whether he’d preach again. The pastor’s illness and gradual recovery from so-called “long COVID” illustrate the virus’ lasting impact in the nearly 2 ½ years since onset of the pandemic. Even as
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incidents of sickness and death from the disease are declining, most of us know people who’ve been infected by the virus – sometimes more than once – and others who died from it. “The pandemic isn’t over, but we’ve kind of reached a spot where we are coexisting with it to an extent,” Dr. Christopher Ohl, an infectious disease specialist with Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, said in a podcast earlier this month. “A lot of people are getting out and doing activities,” said Ohl. But he advised people, especially those with health problems, to wear masks when indoors. “Getting sick with COVID can still be serious business,” he said. Stokesdale accountant Kim Thacker has contracted the virus twice, the first time in January 2021 before she was eligible for a vaccination and the second time last month after she had been vaccinated and boosted. Thacker, 49, still hasn’t recovered her normal taste and smell. Otherwise, she has overcome her first infection, which she likened to being “punched square in my face” because of the severity of headaches and burning sensations across her forehead.
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For some people, loss of taste and smell are among the lingering effects of a bout with COVID-19.
“Over the past 17 months, the only thing that I can eat that tastes the way it is supposed to taste is pickles,” Thacker said in an interview earlier this week. Not only did most of the food she ate taste like “cardboard,” but she said
certain foods, such as red meat, fruits or vegetables, smelled “rotten, rancid and horrible” even though the food was fresh. Last August, a Greensboro neurologist prescribed a seizure medication for Thacker. Though intended to ease bad smells and tastes, she believes the medicine may have helped restore to a small degree, gradually and sporadically, the normal taste of some foods. Thacker said she told her doc-
