Prolonged peril

A growing number of Indians who have recovered from Covid-19 are falling prey to a silent pandemic—the long-Covid syndrome

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

Around three months after she was diagnosed with Covid-19 last year, a 40-year-old woman from Maharashtra’s Palghar district consulted Dr Pavan Pai, neurologist, Wockhardt Hospital, Mira Road, Mumbai. She complained that she was “simply forgetting everything”. She was finding it difficult to do even basic chores “without having someone hold her hand and get things done”.

Hers was not an isolated case. Pai also remembers a fellow doctor who, months after he was cured of Covid, suffered from “a lack of mental clarity, an inability to focus and a milder form of short-term memory loss”. Pai was familiar with the new term that summed up the condition: brain fogging. He had read an American study that said that “close to 33 per cent of recovered Covid-19 patients had brain fogging—symptoms that affect a person’s ability to think clearly. It means feeling confused, anxious, depressed and lost, and finding it difficult to concentrate.”

Late last year onwards, it was becoming apparent to him that an increasing number of Indians were beginning to show symptoms of a “post-Covid syndrome” that had plagued people in the US, the UK and Israel months before they had begun inoculating their population. “I was attending to patients who were coming to me more than eight months after turning Covid-positive, complaining of a persisting, nagging lassitude and fatigue, which would prevent them from performing even simple tasks such as walking six metres,” says Pai.

He attributes this “long-Covid syndrome” to post-Covid fibrosis, or scarring of the lungs. This means that the normally thin, lacy walls of the air sacs in the lungs become thick, stiff and scarred. This leads to oxygen deficiency and, in turn, to shortness of breath.