Some COVID-19 long haulers have had symptoms since the first wave. Can they still get better? Stacey Burling, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Joy Ezekiel-Gibson and Michael Clark both caught COVID-19 last March during the horrible first wave, when tests were hard to get, when only medical workers wore masks if they could find them and when doctors were figuring out on the fly how to treat a brand-new, deadly disease.
Ezekiel-Gibson, 47, of Atco, Camden County, survived 17 days on a ventilator, then needed a second hospitalization for pneumonia and blood clots. Clark, a 32-year-old runner from Philadelphia, fought the virus at home despite serious symptoms. He was afraid to go to the emergency department.
Year of COVID: Everything We Thought We Knew Was Wrong
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Year of COVID: Everything We Thought We Knew Was Wrong
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Because Purim in 2020 caused hundreds of Orthodox Jews to become ill or hospitalized with COVID-19 in the earliest stages of the pandemic, we realized that these patients who were convalescing when others were just coming in contact with SARS-CoV-2 for the first time were an important population to study to better understand why and how the virus spreads through a culturally bonded community, says study co-senior author Avi Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. We felt with that insight, health care practitioners could develop strategies based on scientific evidence to limit the spread of COVID-19 while still enabling important religious and other cultural practices to go on, he explains.