IN MY VIEW | Long Covid’s hidden toll — the South Africans still battling fatigue, anxiety and memory loss

“I feel better, but my mind isn’t the same.” Four years after the Covid-19 pandemic, such comments are still heard regularly in South Africa. What began as a respiratory virus seems to have left a lingering mark on some people who were infected. In South Africa, more than four-million cases 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 UCT set out to understand why some people continue to experience fatigue and anxiety after recovering.

We wanted to know whether the body’s early immune and cardiovascular responses to the virus could help predict who might go on to develop these persistent symptoms. They are often referred to as long Covid. Most studies on long Covid have come from high-income countries in Europe or North America.

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African populations have been underrepresented, despite clear differences in age, health status and environmental exposures that may influence both the course of infection and recovery. We felt that this was an important gap — the neuropsychiatric effects of long Covid in an African context. 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 had at least one neuropsychiatric symptom more than six months after infection. The symptoms included fatigue, concentration or memory difficulties.

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