COVID’s lingering effects

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 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.

Adobe Stock photo For some people, loss of taste and smell are among the lingering eff ects 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.

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-

tor she felt guilty for seeking medical help for her problems, which she considered relatively minor compared to respiratory and other life-threatening ailments suffered by others. Three of her clients have died from COVID-19.

The doctor “looked at me and said, ‘Stop. You have every right to feel the way that you feel. You have lost a quality of life that you’ve had for 49 years,’” Thacker said.

She said she’s felt “teased” by the coming and going of taste and smell. Nine months ago, she dipped a bread stick in marinara sauce and, surprisingly, she was able to taste the sauce.

“It didn’t taste like marinara, but I got something from it,” she said. “I burst out crying. That was the fi rst thing I had tasted.”

Since then, Thacker has been able to distinguish sweetness and spiciness in some foods and beverages, such as iced tea. Earlier this year, she developed a repulsion to butter, ice cream and other dairy products. Her taste has improved slightly after recovering from her second bout of COVID-19.

Those are the sorts of steps – forward and backwards – that Thacker anticipates, though she hopes her taste and smell will eventually return to normal.

For now, she said, “I’ve had to accept what’s going on with me. These are my new tastes and smells.”

Aside from the medical consequences, the pandemic brought unprecedented social and economic repercussions as well as altered the political landscape. The partial shutdown of the U.S. economy and the temporary closing of schools and workplaces separated people from one another and their normal patterns.

As health-related restrictions eased, the resurgence of the economy has left employers scrambling to fill jobs and sparked inflation. Not only has the sharpest jump in prices in more than four decades pinched consumers, it’s also emerged as a political weapon for Republicans against Democrats in advance of next year’s U.S. congressional elections.

“Looming over all of this uncertainty is the possibility that new variants will emerge and undermine any collective sense of progress,” according to a report by the Pew Research Center in March, the start of the pandemic’s third year. “The public, for its part, appears to recognize that a swift return to life as it was before the pandemic is unlikely.”

COVID-19 has claimed the lives of nearly 1.01 million people in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The virus-related death toll exceeds 25,100 in North Carolina and 1,200 in Guilford County, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

The department’s data shows that northwestern Guilford County has emerged much better than some other areas, with 7,395 cases and 56 deaths related to COVID-19, based upon the primary mailing zip codes in Summerfield, Oak Ridge and Stokesdale.

Trends at Greensboro-based Cone Health are tracking national statistics, with the number of hospitalizations related to COVID-19 falling sharply from a peak of 335 on Jan. 26 to 55 as of June 17.

However, Cone hospitalizations have edged up since April, reflecting national increases partly due to infections from two Omicron variants. Even so, deaths related to the infection are relatively low. Statewide, they’ve hovered in the single digits on a daily basis since April – down from a peak of 247 on May 18, 2021.

“The virus mutations are giving up some lethality in favor of increased spread,” Christopher Scheib, executive director of Cone’s enterprise analytics, said in a recent interview.

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