We're in no man's land. We don't know if this is chronic.
Long COVID affects 5-10% of patients for months, causing physical symptoms like fatigue, memory loss, and breathing problems that severely limit daily activities. Mental health impacts—anxiety, depression, fear—are as debilitating as physical symptoms; uncertainty about disease progression and medical unknowns worsen psychological distress.
- 10% of COVID-19 patients remain ill after three weeks; up to 5% may stay sick for months
- Felicity Callard, a 49-year-old British professor, classified as having a mild case, could walk only one kilometer from her home five months later
- Morena Colombi, 59, diagnosed in February in Italy, continues to suffer symptoms months after infection
- WHO director general acknowledged less than eight months of experience with long-term COVID effects as of the article's publication
Thousands of COVID-19 survivors worldwide report debilitating long-term symptoms including fatigue, memory loss, and breathing difficulties, alongside severe anxiety and depression. The uncertainty surrounding disease progression and lack of medical answers intensify psychological distress among patients.
Felicity Callard was 49 years old and fit when March arrived. She was active, strong, the kind of person who moved through the world without thinking about it. By early April, five months after what doctors had classified as a mild case of COVID-19, she could barely walk a kilometer from her house. Her mind had become a place of constant dread—not about the virus itself anymore, but about what it might have done to her heart, her lungs, her brain. She told Reuters that the disease had destroyed her completely. Her life had changed so radically that she was essentially confined to a small radius around her home, the farthest distance she could manage on foot.
Callard is one of thousands of people worldwide who have found themselves trapped in a strange medical limbo, months after their initial infection, reporting symptoms that refuse to resolve. The list is long and varied: breathlessness, memory loss, crushing fatigue, headaches, brain fog, muscle pain, joint swelling. These accounts appear constantly in online patient forums and support groups, where people compare notes on what is happening to their bodies. But the physical symptoms, while debilitating, are only part of the story. For many, the psychological toll—the anxiety, the depression, the fear—is equally or more disabling than the bodily weakness itself.
Sandra Edwards, 46, from Britain, now helps run a newly formed patient support group called LongCovidSOS. She describes a pattern of relapse and remission that has become familiar to many long COVID patients. "We're in no man's land," she said. "We don't know if this is chronic or if we'll reach a point where we recover completely." The unpredictability is the cruelest part. You wake up and have no idea how you'll feel—not just from day to day, but sometimes from hour to hour. It's a slow erosion.
Data from a symptom-tracking app developed by scientists at King's College London, cited by LongCovidSOS, suggests that about 10 percent of COVID-19 patients remain ill after three weeks, and up to 5 percent may stay sick for months. Morena Colombi, a 59-year-old from Truccazzano near Milan, was diagnosed with COVID-19 in February and continues to suffer its aftermath. She told Reuters that one day she might feel better, but the next day she pays the price. She feels mentally abandoned. Even the doctors don't know how to help her. She can no longer resume her life as it was, and that reality depresses her deeply.
Til Wykes, a psychology professor at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, points to uncertainty as a defining feature of anxiety. With COVID-19, the disease's progression remains unknown. Doctors are unsure how to help, which leaves patients feeling frightened and isolated. In most illnesses, there is a known trajectory: this happens first, then that, then recovery or decline. But with COVID-19, symptoms appear, seem to fade, then return again. The pattern itself becomes a source of terror.
When the World Health Organization met last month with groups representing long COVID patients, its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, assured them: "We hear you loud and clear." But he also acknowledged the hard truth: "We still know relatively little about the long-term effects. We have less than eight months of experience with this coronavirus pandemic." Patients like Callard and Edwards understand that doctors are dealing with an entirely new disease caused by a novel virus, and they cannot reasonably expect all the answers. Yet both the patients and mental health specialists agree that the psychological impact of this unpredictability and loss of control makes everything worse.
Rona Moss-Morris, head of psychology at the same institute, notes that data from previous disease outbreaks and studies of patients in critical or intensive care show significant impacts on anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. There is something particularly terrifying about being at home—not in a hospital—and feeling as though you can barely breathe. The stories that emerge from these situations are stories of terror. The fear is not abstract. It lives in the body, in the uncertainty, in the slow erosion of a life that once felt normal and within reach.
Notable Quotes
This disease destroyed me completely. My life has changed radically. I'm basically confined to a kilometer from my house.— Felicity Callard, British university professor with long COVID
We're in no man's land. We don't know if this is chronic or if we'll reach a point where we recover completely.— Sandra Edwards, co-founder of LongCovidSOS patient support group
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does the uncertainty seem to matter more than the symptoms themselves?
Because uncertainty removes the one thing that helps us endure suffering—the knowledge that it will end. With COVID-19, patients don't know if they're recovering or declining. That not-knowing becomes its own kind of illness.
Callard was told her case was mild. Does that make the aftermath worse?
Yes. There's a betrayal in it. If you're told something is mild, you expect to bounce back. When you don't, you question everything—your body, your mind, whether you're imagining it. The mismatch between expectation and reality is its own trauma.
The doctors don't have answers. Does that make patients lose trust in medicine?
Not exactly. Patients understand this is new. But when a doctor can't help, the patient feels abandoned. That's different from distrust. It's loneliness inside the medical system.
Is the anxiety a symptom of COVID-19, or a response to having COVID-19?
Both. The virus may damage the nervous system directly. But the psychological weight—the fear, the unpredictability—that's a response to the experience itself. And it compounds everything else.
What do these patients need that they're not getting?
A name for what's happening to them. A timeline. A path forward. Right now they're living in a story with no ending written yet.