South Africans are still battling the effects of long COVID

"I FEEL better, but my mind isn't the same." Four years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, such comments are still heard regularly in many medical practices in South Africa. What began as a respiratory virus seems to have left a lingering mark on some people who were infected.

- JONNY PETER

In South Africa, more than 4 million cases of COVID-19 were confirmed. For some people, the physical recovery was just the beginning. Ongoing fatigue, poor concentration, and mood changes due to lasting viral effects have affected work, relationships and quality of life.

Our team of specialist psychiatrists, clinical immunologists and laboratory scientists at the University of Cape Town set out to understand why some people continue to experience fatigue, anxiety and memory loss long after recovering from COVID-19. We wanted to know whether the body's early immune and cardiovascular responses to the virus - that is, how the body fought the virus - could help predict who might go on to develop these persistent symptoms. They are often referred to as long COVID, or a major component of long COVID.

Our recent research revealed an alarming picture. More than half of the participants in our study group of people in Cape Town who had been infected with the coronavirus (and mostly had been in hospital with COVID-19) had at least one neuropsychiatric symptom more than six months after infection. The symptoms included fatigue, concentration or memory difficulties. Many still had these symptoms up to two years later. Unfortunately, none of the blood biomarkers we measured during acute infection, including those linked to inflammation, cardiovascular stress and the entry system for the SARSCoV-2 virus, the renin-angiotensin system, could predict who would develop long-term cognitive or mental health problems. Biomarkers are biological signs of what's happening in the body.