Sue Shrinkle-Emmons is shown at her home in Vista. She has been suffering from long COVID since contracting COVID-19 in April. (Zoë Meyers/inewsource)
Sue Shrinkle-Emmons, had been careful to avoid COVID since the pandemic began. She took every precaution she could.
It wasn’t until April of this year that the 39-year-old eventually caught it, after she and her husband had traveled to Hawaii for their honeymoon.
COVID for Shrinkle-Emmons was like the worst flu she ever had. She spent the first few days barely able to get out of bed, bogged down by headaches, muscle weakness, malaise, and brain fog. While she was able to get therapeutics to treat her infection, these symptoms never really went away.
Late last month, she was diagnosed with long COVID, a post-viral syndrome that has been the focus of growing concern surrounding the long-term implications of the pandemic given the life-altering effects that it has on a person and its already significant prevalence in adults.
Nearly one in five adults who have contracted COVID-19 nationwide are currently experiencing prolonged symptoms according to recent estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with younger adults seeing three times as many cases of these conditions compared to older age groups.
In California, about one in four adults who have ever had a COVID infection experience long-term symptoms, according to the CDC data. Based on these rates at the state level, inewsource estimates that about 274,880 San Diegans could be living with post-COVID conditions, however, there are currently no county-wide numbers.
Experts are worried about the potential increase in the number of people who experience these conditions, as new variants emerge and high rates of activity paired with minimal public health precautions remaining in place continue to push transmission rates up.
Read the full article on inewsource.org.
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