Health Shared Logo whiteHealth Shared Logo dark
Experience of long Covid
Contextual AwarenessExperiential Knowledgelong Covidmyalgic encephalopathyexhaustionorthopaedic surgery

Experience of long Covid

Professor Harrop-Griffiths, Vice-President of the Royal College of Anaesthetists, discusses some of the long term effects of Covid he has come across, known as long Covid, and that it is a real condition and may be life-changing for some people.

Transcript (auto-generated)

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

Do you have any stories or personal experiences of people who are suffering from long Covid symptoms? Well I have one minor one that was of considerable interest to me. An acquaintance is an orthopaedic surgeon, a typically robust, outgoing, physically strong, resilient orthopaedic surgeon who had COVID and developed a couple of conditions, but one he developed for some time afterwards was a form of ME, a sort of myalgic encephalopathy. Now he admitted to me that he never really had believed in the existence of such a condition and thought perhaps it was a form of a psychological disorder, but he told me that when he had some two to three months after having had the acute phase of COVID-19. He was working from home and by the middle of the afternoon was physically unable to lift a telephone up from the desk to his ear. Such was the extent of his exhaustion. That really hammered home to me that this talk of long COVID, of the condition going beyond the acute, was real, is real, and I of course were hearing there are far more serious conditions than that affecting virtually every part of the body. That really was one of the things that convinced me that long COVID exists and is real and for many people appears to be life-changing.

Comments