AARP Hearing Center
It was close to Christmas when Thomas Goldsmith, a musician in Raleigh, North Carolina, knew he'd been hit with COVID-19. “I had lots of terrible aches and pains, serious fatigue, loss of appetite, shortness of breath and a weird disorientation,” Goldsmith, 69, recalls. Testing soon confirmed he'd contracted the virus. “It was two weeks of the flu-beyond-the-flu,” he says. “The worst part was it didn't really go away after two weeks. It was more like two months."
Goldsmith was afflicted with what's commonly called post-COVID syndrome or long COVID. The National Institutes of Health only recently named it: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Sufferers experience lingering COVID-19 symptoms including chronic cough, chest pain, shortness of breath, memory and sleep problems for four to six weeks — or much longer — after they no longer test positive for the infection.
A study published by researchers from the University of Washington suggests that between 10 percent and 30 percent of COVID patients are so-called long-haulers, which, given the nearly 33 million cases in the United States, could add up to more than 9 million people.
Swift improvement after second dose reported
Fortunately for Goldsmith, his symptoms seemed to disappear after he received his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. “The improvement was amazingly quick,” he says. “My appetite, energy, concentration all returned, and I felt almost human again."
Goldsmith says he didn't connect the vaccine to his improved health until he began hearing others describe similar experiences. In a survey conducted by Survivor Corps, an online grassroots group of COVID-19 survivors, roughly 40 percent of participants reported partial to full resolution of their symptoms after they were vaccinated. About 23 percent of long COVID patients in a small U.K. study said they had an “increase in symptom resolution” after being vaccinated, compared to about 15 percent of people who were not vaccinated.