Heller-Scheunemann felt that she couldn't do her job as a manager due to her long Covid symptoms. — dpa
Taking showers was painful for Silvana Heller-Scheunemann, and her clothes brushing against her skin was hardly bearable.
"My head felt like a pincushion," the 50-year-old long Covid patient says.
Like many people, she's had to grapple with severe long-term effects of the disease.
And a new wave of Covid-19 cases this autumn and winter in the Northern Hemisphere could add to the numbers of so-called "long haulers".
Cognitive impairment is a common long Covid symptom.
Heller-Scheunemann, currently receiving treatment at the Seehof Rehab Centre in the German town of Teltow, near Berlin, suddenly noticed memory lapses after her infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in February 2022.
"I couldn't remember the way to certain places anymore," she says.
"And I couldn't write properly: Some of the letters I put to paper were backwards.
"That was very scary, and I started to wonder whether I could do my job in such a state."
According to the German Medical Association, up to 15% of people who contract Covid-19 develop long-term symptoms.
They have severely disrupted Heller-Scheunemann's life, and for several months, she was unable to work at her managerial position.
"I knew I couldn't go to work in my condition. You can't be an efficient manager when you've lost all these skills."
In contrast to other patient cohorts, a conspicuously large proportion of long haulers at the Seehof centre have a secondary school diploma or university degree.
This has surprised the centre's medical director, Dr Volker Köllner, who combines his work as a physician with research on Covid-19.
"In all my 30 years of research, I'd never seen such an enormous disparity in patient cohorts' educational levels as in the long Covid study," he says, noting that people with intellectually demanding jobs especially complain of difficulty concentrating.
"A teacher comes to us, for instance, and says she's constantly forgetting certain words and draws a blank while standing at the blackboard."
Subsequent testing then reveals that she in fact has a cognitive impairment, often to a surprisingly pronounced degree.
Women are disproportionately affected by long Covid, according to Dr Köllner.
"There may be hormonal and immunological reasons for this," he says, adding that women are also more likely than men to bear a double burden of employment and domestic responsibilities, and hence less able to take a recuperative post-Covid time out.
So how can women cope?
Long Covid patient Silke Wichmann has found ways to deal with her new deficiencies.
"I took breaks, and on some days said I couldn't handle the shopping or hanging out the laundry and that someone else would have to do it," remarks the 52-year-old, whose various symptoms following her infection in April 2021 have included shortness of breath and poor concentration.
She says she's able to manage her symptoms quite well now, thanks to the therapy she receives at the Seehof centre, where she follows an exercise programme.
Doctors and therapists have learned a lot since the outbreak of the pandemic more than two years ago (2020).
The advisability of exercise for patients, in particular, was long a question mark.
Does it harm more than help?
Exercise therapy has since become a key element of Dr Köllner's long Covid treatment.
"The vast majority of patients benefit from carefully-measured endurance training, along with exercise therapy," he says.
The German Respiratory Society (DGP), for its part, strongly recommends exercise therapy for long Covid patients as well.
And the federal office of German Pension Insurance (DRV) too, underscores the importance of multifaceted, easily accessible exercise therapy for long Covid patients.
Its director of rehabilitation, Brigitte Gross, says: "If the pumping function of someone's heart is impaired after a Covid infection, rehabilitation begins, for example, with measured endurance training to enable the person to climb stairs again."
Roughly 10,000 rehabilitations for Covid-19 were carried out in 2021 under the DRV's auspices.
On average, patients were treated for 26 days.
Doctors and scientists have increasingly been urging that greater attention be paid to the long-term effects of the disease, as many feel that the problem has been underestimated.
On the positive side, Dr Köllner says people's growing familiarity with Covid-19 since its worldwide outbreak in 2020 has made them "considerably more immunocompetent".
But he says they shouldn't take the virus lightly and must remain on their guard.
"I don't think it's likely, but a more aggressive – that is, more dangerous and deadly – variant could appear," he warns. – By Stella Venohr/dpa
