Port Richey woman shares struggle with long COVID years after infection
6 years later: Millions living with long COVID
Six years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans are still living with its long-term effects. FOX 13's Evan Axelbank reports.
PORT RICHEY, Fla. - Six years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans are still living with its long-term effects.
Julie Talamo doesn't miss masks, because sometimes, she still needs one.
"I'm a bit of a germaphobe now," Talamo said. "I'm afraid to go in big crowds because I'm afraid of getting sick."
The backstory:
The Port Richey resident got COVID in 2022, and to this day, has nodules in her lungs, experiences shortness of breath and sees a doctor twice a year.
"He walked in immediately, said, ‘You have asthma, you have chronic lung scarring, this is going to be your life,’" Talamo said. "I can't do physical things I used to do."
By the numbers:
Talamo’s case is among the approximately 30 million that became long COVID. More than 300 million Americans got COVID, and 1.2 million Americans died.
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Dr. John Morrison of AdventHealth says he sees two to three long COVID patients per month.
They mostly have fatigue, breathing and sleeping trouble and headaches.
"This particular virus is insidious in the fact that it just really revs up the immune response, and it doesn't stop," Morrison said.
Most of the symptoms are treatable and are often made less severe if a patient was vaccinated for COVID before getting the virus.
What they're saying:
Dr. Michael Teng, a virologist at University of South Florida, says one lingering COVID effect is actually a positive one.
That includes knowledge of mRNA vaccines, given they were developed to respond to COVID in real time, with cancer vaccines now a likely result.
"We can think about having a personalized medicine approach for somebody's particular cancer," Teng said. "How do we vaccinate against that particular cancer versus somebody else's cancer that looks similar?"
Dig deeper:
When it comes to long COVID, doctors have learned that patients can get it even on a second or third infection.
The lingering effects on the body and the mind are substantial.
Six years later, Talamo is reflecting on the damage it did to herself and to our society.
COVID-prevention measures became a huge topic of debate.
"We lost friends. We lost family," Talamo said. "We became even more divided than I think we already were."
Local perspective:
Teng says USF has become the international headquarters of the Global Virus Network.
A conference was just held about pandemic preparedness and the lessons that COVID taught in response to the virus itself, and to its lingering effects.
Teng says adaptability in developing vaccines and antivirals has been among the most important, particularly when it comes to real-time clinical trials.
The Source: Information for this story was gathered from interviews with a virologist at University of South Florida, a doctor at AdventHealth and a local long COVID patient.