Today, Explained - Life after Covid-19, explained by Carl (who had it)

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

Some people walk away from Covid-19 feeling fine. Others are dealing with a long list of lingering health issues. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. We're coming up on five months since much of the country shut down to contain COVID-19, and I think it's fair to say the country hasn't been the same since. But today on the show, we want to find out how people who have had COVID are doing, those who have survived. It was about five months ago I spoke to Carl who got COVID on the Diamond

Princess cruise ship. I spoke to him again last night. Hello, Carl. Hey, Sean. How are you doing? Doing well, but it looks like you might be back in the hospital. Yeah, I'm back in the hospital, but I'm okay. I'm glad to hear that. The last time we spoke, you were at a quarantine facility in Omaha, Nebraska, and this was, I believe, early March. Does that sound right to you? Yeah, I ended up being there for 29 days, climbing the walls to get out of there. Substantial. Okay, so 29 days in a quarantine facility. What happened over the course of those 29 days? Why did it take so long to get out? They don't know. Right now, the CDC back then said I had to have two

negative results, and it just took that long. And the doctor kept handing the results on a Post-it note. I mean, it was like the Grim Reaper coming in. He changed colors every once in a while. I have a collection now of Post-it notes with my negatives and positives on there, but I kept testing positive for a long, long time. And so eventually what? One day you just tested negative? Yeah, one day I tested negative, and then we had to wait two days.

Two days later I tested negative, and I was a free man. And what did you do then? Did they put you back on a private plane, or did you just get to walk over to the airport? A private plane. A friend had gotten me a charter private plane that went from Omaha back to Southern California. And then a friend picked me up in a long stretch limo and had gotten me a giant bowl of my favorite ice cream. So I had the peanut butter cup ice cream. Wow, Carl, I've heard a lot of sad stories about COVID-19, but that is a happy ending to a pretty rough start there. Absolutely. But as you, as where I'm sitting

right now is back in the hospital. So what happened is my body, I think at least the doctors seem to think that makes sense. My body did a great job of fighting Corona, but I had a precondition of what's called GBS, Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is why they put me in the isolation unit to begin with, a quarantine unit, biocontainment unit. My body did a great job of fighting the COVID-19, but I couldn't touch the GBS and the doctors couldn't touch the GBS while I was sitting there the 29 days, plus all the time on the Diamond Princess. So here I am now with numb legs, numb feet. It's a condition called CIDP, which is a chronic version. They've now tried two different kinds of treatments for me. So this is my second round

in the hospital since I returned home at the mid-March. And I've got about a week of therapy to learn to walk again. Wow. Now, the one cool thing I wanted to share with you and your listeners is that we were invited, my wife and I were invited back to the White House in April. And it was very magical. And I say this to everyone, if Obama had invited me back, I would be just as a thrill. But having Vice President Pence spend the whole day with us, he and his staff, and then President Trump was supposed to spend about five minutes with us, which ended up being about an hour and a half. But this was great. I thought, I said, come on, this will take five minutes.

And it's taken a lot longer than five minutes, and that's because I found it so interesting. That's great. There were eight of us who, from different walks of life, different ends of the spectrum politically, and different experiences with COVID-19. The president and I wanted to have a chance to see all of you and let the country hear your stories,

because while we rightly, as a nation, reflect on the more than 23,000 Americans who have succumbed to the coronavirus as a tribute to our health care workers, we also do well to reflect on more than 44,000 Americans who have fully recovered, and you're among them. So you traveled to D.C. and you didn't say hello to us? We're all here in D.C., Carl.

I know. They shipped us right off to a hotel. We were all in quarantine, of course. Okay, fair. Other than your GBS acting up and leading to this chronic CIDP, have you had any lingering effects of COVID directly? Yeah, they're still doing, I signed up back when I was in Nebraska for a clinical study. So they're still following me right now to see what it was. And they took many, many tests there. And then our blood, one of the hospitals here, Providence, took our blood because my wife was in a cesspool of corona

and never got it. She, even though she was in that cesspool of corona, never got the virus. And they tested her and she's got no antibodies or very few showing the virus in there. But what they did is they took out her T cells and her T cells are kind of like a Superman. They touch the virus and instantly kill it. So they brought in all varieties of coronavirus from around the world, which I think is some 20 or 30 different species of the

virus, did the same thing with the T-cells and the same thing happened. Her T-cells instantly killed every one of the viruses. So now they're digging deeper to try and figure out what's in her blood that makes her the superwoman and see if they can get some answers that way. So they're studying us from the various degrees. Obviously, with CIDP now and GBS, having had corona, having had COVID-19, they're watching very carefully to see what transpires. Both can be deadly if they get in the lungs. I've been very lucky that neither has gotten in my lungs. So I've been very good with that. Although I have noticed that my voice is much wispier.

I'm a broadcast guy too. We own the local radio station out here and usually have a booming voice, but that disappeared about three weeks ago. And I don't know, nor do the doctors know, if it's something total unique, if it's dealing with and tied in with CIDP, or if it is post-corona. We may never know the answer to that. And I'm finding little things that are after effects. And again, with each of those, I'm having trouble distinguishing if it was between CIDP or Corona. And in the meantime, what's your disposition? How do you feel? Are you feeling lucky that you beat it? I feel great. I feel great psychologically. I still have my sense of humor. I've got a goal of skiing again next winter, even though I probably won't do the extreme slopes, and then bicycling next summer.

So I plan to plow through this and lead a normal life when I'm done. It may take a while, but I'm going to do it. That's amazing to hear, and I commend your spirit. Just so we can set our clocks, when is it that you're going to be skiing and this is all going to be over? I believe by my 68th birthday, which is February 22nd, is my prediction. So maybe you can join me on the slopes. I hope you're right. If you're right, I certainly will. Thank you so much, Carl. And good luck. I hope you get out of the hospital soon. For sure. Thanks, Sean. You take care.

Carl's actually been kind of lucky. There's a raft of lingering effects of COVID people are experiencing. That's after the break on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. My name is Lois Partially, and I am a freelance investigative journalist and the 2019-2020 Sneddon Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, which means I'm in Alaska. What's the temperature like there? It is 50 degrees and raining, and I'm currently looking at a fox hunting in my backyard. Man, it is like 110 and swampy here. And the only thing outside my

house are rats. Well, I know you probably don't want to hear this, but I would trade for a little summer weather. No, I thought you might say so, Lois. Grass is always greener. We just spoke to Carl, who took a good while to recover from COVID. You've been writing about COVID recovery and lasting effects for Vox. How's recovery been for everyone else out there? The CDC recently put out a report that says that even people with mild cases can have long-term consequences. They're reporting about a third of cases suffer long-term symptoms. So that can mean either weeks or months, depending on the person. I should note that it's important that many people fully recover. But another study

in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that even two months after their first symptoms, 87% of people still had symptoms. And these weren't just the sickest people. Only 12% of the people in that study were admitted to an ICU. So it's not just severe cases of COVID-19 that can have these long-term consequences. Carl didn't have many lingering aspects beyond just like losing his voice, he said, but let's talk about what other people are experiencing. What are the lasting impacts of COVID-19? So at the beginning of the pandemic, when we were first hearing about cases in China,

the reports were about respiratory symptoms. It causes a pneumonia-like lung infection, and so far nearly 300 cases have been reported in China. At least six people are known to have died. But it turns out that COVID-19 isn't just an illness that affects your lungs. And we really shouldn't just be talking about it in terms of mortality. And that's especially true in the U.S. right now, as we're seeing an uptick in the number of young people who are getting sick. Many young people may not necessarily get sick enough to go to the hospital, but they can get very sick.

It turns out that SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19, affects a lot of your major organs, including your heart, your kidneys, your brain, even your nervous system and your bloodstream. Yikes. Okay, well, let's take a deep breath and get into all of that. Starting with, I guess, the thing that most people are aware of, what's the lingering effects on people's lungs that we've seen? So basically, you have all these gaps in your lungs. If you think about them like a sponge, those gaps are supposed to be there. But when you're sick with COVID-19, those spaces can get filled with debris and pus. And so that makes your lung way less flexible. Normally when you breathe,

your lung expands like a balloon. And when it's filled with all this pus, it can't do that. So in acute infections, that ends up looking like ground. You may have heard of people talking about ground glass opacities, which is on a CT scan, a normal lung will look black and COVID-19 patients' lungs look gray. So it's kind of unclear how much of that goes away once your acute infection is gone. And it's still too early to know how many of those are going to be permanent, but we can look back at other coronaviruses that we know a little more about, like SARS and MERS. And studies on both of those coronaviruses suggest that about a third

of patients have some level of reduced lung capacity for the long term. One of the studies actually followed patients for 15 years. So that suggests that some of this lung damage may be permanent. Wow. Let's move on to the heart. What's going on with people's hearts in COVID-19 and how may those effects linger? Yeah, just this week, there's a new study out of about 100 relatively young patients that showed that about 80% of them have inflammation or other cardiac symptoms after they've recovered, including, again, people who were never sick enough to go to the hospital. After two months, 78 patients still had structural changes in their heart. And this also relates to blood circulation, I imagine? Yeah. So in addition to

the heart inflammation problem, a lot of COVID-19 patients also have abnormal blood clotting, which if you have blood clots in the major veins of your body, that can cause deep vein thrombosis. And if those clots travel to your brain, it can cause a stroke. And if it goes to your heart, it can cause a heart attack. And the bad news keeps piling on. You mentioned the brain and the nervous system. What's going on there? Yeah. Blood clots, unfortunately, are not the only nervous system problem with this disease. A lot of patients are reporting pretty frightening neurological symptoms, like having

brain fog or forgetting what they're saying in the middle of speaking and having pretty severe memory issues that keep them from working the way they normally do. One paper actually called the disease a global threat to the entire nervous system and suggested that a lot of people have these neurological symptoms, possibly as many as over a third. It's a heavy list of COVID-19 symptoms that might linger for people. Yeah, there's one that's a little less serious, but equally odd. Some people are reporting altered senses of taste and smell. Again, for months after they first got sick.

A lot of people, for some reason in particular, talk about both garlic and onions tasting weird. And some people are being followed around by a phantom smell that they can really only describe as something that's like earthy. Weirdly, it seems to be somewhat smell specific. So the only quirky Lindgren effect is just really depressing if you like food. Yeah, which I would say is a significant effect. Yeah. If only it could have been like some people were reporting that they had really great vision after having COVID or

something like that. So far as I know, none of these long-term symptoms make life better. I know there's so much focus on a vaccine right now, but have there been any breakthroughs in treating all of these lingering symptoms from, you know, inflammation of the lungs to the heart to the nervous system to people losing their sense of smell and taste? Yeah, there have been. There are a number of post-COVID-19 clinics popping up around the country. And it's really important that people know if they're having long-term symptoms, that even if we don't totally understand what's causing them, that there are treatments that can help them manage these symptoms. Some of those treatments come from

research on how to recover from being hospitalized generally with other diseases. We know that if you're intubated or ventilated or you're in an ICU, especially if you're there for a long time, that can have a number of different impacts on your body. For example, being in bed for a long time causes your muscles to deteriorate, which can make any shortness of breath feel worse. And there's also significant emotional impacts of being so sick and worried about what's going to happen to you. A lot of people experience anxiety, depression, PTSD after being in the hospital. So we have research on what some of these impacts are like, and there are people who are working to help COVID patients get treatment for

these kinds of symptoms. I just feel like hearing about all these lingering effects really brings to light the fact that this virus is just no joke, irrespective of how confident or healthy or young you might be, because you may have lingering symptoms that last potentially for the rest of your life? Yeah, I think, unfortunately, a lot of the conversation has been around whether or not you'll die if you get COVID-19. And unfortunately, that doesn't come close to describing the many different impacts it can have on your life. It can be a really life-changing experience to be sick for months, especially when no one knows how to help you feel better. That's an incredibly anxiety-inducing and frustrating experience. I talked to one doctor in the UK who's been sick since March,

and he's a doctor. He knows quite a bit about both the virus and working in an ICU is his normal day job, but he says that he feels like his life has been turned upside down. He doesn't know when he's going to be able to go back to work. And that's just a really tough position to be in. Well, Lois, thank you for helping us understand COVID-19 a little bit more. And maybe when we understand it even further, we'll have you back on to talk about it.

Thanks for bringing more attention to this. I know a lot of people have been feeling really frustrated and just feeling like they're being heard, I think, will help, I hope. I think it will. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you.