Mini-Long-Covid - Column by Sascha Lobo

Enlarge image

Young woman with protective mask

Photo: Maria Sbytova / iStockphoto / Getty Images

When someone, visibly shocked, explains that asparagus is still a bit woody, people on the Internet speak of "First World Problems".

This text goes a little in that direction, because it deals with the less profound consequences of a corona disease.

Especially if you compare these consequences with the classic, destructive Long Covid, which the famous colleague Margarete Stokowski reported on.

Nonetheless, I think I observed something worth noting, I call it: Mini Long Covid.

In February and March I get Corona, a good two weeks after my booster vaccination.

Experts say that in a way this is the ideal time for an infection anyway, but I didn't choose it voluntarily, after all the course is quite mild.

No fever, just headache, drowsiness, slight confusion, severe congestion.

Relatives are visiting right now, all of them mild, we spontaneously open a three-week quarantine iso-flat share until everyone is negative again.

As if something was left of the disease

What I explain to myself as the Mini Long Covid does not start suddenly.

It feels more like it's left over from the disease.

In the beginning it seems ignorable, the disease just seems to subside quite slowly.

When it can no longer be denied that something isn't going quite right, I look for some other explanation.

And, of course, find some that are highly successful.

Well, I slept really badly that night.

Maybe a very late winter flu is going around again.

Plus pollen alert.

In addition, in the third Corona March, everyone is somehow still a little exhausted.

My first observed symptom of Mini Long Covid is disproportionately frequent sneezing.

The symptom that seems most annoying to me is word finding difficulties.

I can no longer think of very obvious words, and I falter in the middle of a sentence.

Likewise, names that have been familiar to me for years slip away from me.

Sometimes I choke on syllables because I just think them but accidentally don't say them.

In addition, there are now and then short, not particularly severe headache attacks that pass like indecisive thunderclouds.

My nose is almost never completely clear and is often itchy, but sometimes it fills surprisingly at night with slippery amounts of mucus.

My ability to concentrate is mostly okay, but sometimes I have to endure a nervous confusion for ten, twenty minutes where it makes no sense,

want to write something or think in a structured way.

A certain shortness of breath is also noticeable when I want to scurry up a flight of stairs a little faster.

more on the subject

Corona consequences: Freedom Day or not, Long Covid is a serious problemA column by Margarete Stokowski

All of these things are among the classic symptoms of Long Covid.

So you might think from the outside, sure, Long Covid.

But there is one important difference.

As described in the media and by those affected, Long Covid is a very serious disease.

That's just not what I have, I can cover most of the appearances, they might be a bit annoying here and there in everyday life.

But I

an everyday life.

It just doesn't feel right that I could be standing next to someone whose life has imploded from exhaustion, organ damage and bouts of severe pain - and we're both said to have Long Covid (even if that technically might be the case).

But it also doesn't feel right to pretend that there is nothing or that everything is imaginary.

Hence the name Mini Long Covid.

Incidentally, it's not that absurd to think of something like that, because Long Covid didn't come into being as an officially defined syndrome name - but as a hashtag on Twitter (albeit by a doctor and Long Covid patient named Elisa Perego).

Malik Böttcher is a family doctor in Berlin, runs a corona practice and is the managing director of a clinic that offered a corona outpatient clinic.

He fought on many fronts of the pandemic and was also a participant in the weekly Corona discussion group between the Berlin clinic management and the Senator for Health.

In an interview, he confirms the observations: »I would describe the occurrence of one or more symptoms of the SARS-CoV-2 infection that show a prolonged course as a mini long covid.

The health restrictions are often only slight and therefore receive little attention.

However, they are individually perceived as unsettling and can thus reduce the quality of life.«

Perhaps this is the key to understanding Mini Long Covid.

It's too easy to worry or genuinely suffer from and tell your doctor, but too present to be ignored.

Of course, this low threshold also makes Mini Long Covid elusive.

Especially when some doctors still consider severe Long Covid to be imaginary or psychosomatic.

Talking to a wider circle of acquaintances shows that significantly more than every second person previously suffering from corona reports certain, well, mini symptoms.

And nobody wants to call it Long Covid right away, if only because most are happy to have survived the disease.

You can't get enough of anecdotal evidence, but the science is just getting started, the coronavirus,

The fear of being ridiculed as a hypochondriac

The current study situation indicates a proportion of around 10 percent of people who are said to develop Long Covid after a Covid infection.

But this number is at least shaky because, depending on the measurement method and the group affected, it can be well over 50 percent.

In addition, a well-known article in the specialist magazine »The Lancet« published a collection of symptoms for Long Covid in summer 2021.

With around 200 entries, which of course means that almost everything is there.

More specifically, Long Covid symptoms include constipation, nightmares, stiff neck, skin blisters, incomprehensible babble, coughing up blood and the feeling that the brain is on fire.

If you have something, it can always be somehow Long Covid, that doesn't make the situation any easier.

This makes it even more difficult to detect Mini Long Covid.

A certain fear of being ridiculed as a hypochondriac or busybody also often plays a role in non-severe illnesses and disorders.

Advertisement

Sasha Lobo

Reality shock: Ten lessons from the present

Publisher: Kiepenheuer&Witsch

Number of pages: 400 pages

Publisher: Kiepenheuer&Witsch

Number of pages: 400 pages

Buy for €22.00

price query time

05/11/2022 4:13 p.m

No guarantee

Order from Amazon

Order from Thalia

Order from Weltbild

Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.

Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the retailer when you make a purchase.

More information here

After a large number of discussions with those affected and observers of the pandemic from different, professional perspectives, I have - obviously - come to the conclusion that Mini Long Covid should be spoken about publicly.

The fact that patients with Long Covid are much worse off and need much more urgent treatment and care - probably nobody among those affected by Mini-Long-Covid denies that.

But maybe the name and the mention of Mini Long Covid will help those who, as Malik Böttcher describes, feel insecure and whose quality of life is suffering according to their own perception.

If only because the feeling of not having gotten over it just yet can be very depressing.

In mid-May 2022, almost ten weeks after the last positive corona test, I am still feeling the mini-long Covid consequences, but there are changes.

The word-finding disorders, for example, vary in intensity and are now more dependent on the general state of fitness.

I can't say exactly if my brain just got used to it and therefore worked out workarounds.

The nocturnal mucus attacks have become less frequent, but there are more days on which I have to sneeze very often.

The headaches have either lessened or I now automatically throw in the ibuprofen so mercilessly and so quickly that it feels less.

Yes, definitely, these are First World Problems.

Nevertheless, I would be happy if someone developed a long-Covid drug and can say for motivation: It will not only be taken by the presumed 10 percent heavy long-Covid victims.

But also us, the presumably huge number of Mini Long Covid sufferers.

Just because of the, well, things.