Madrid (EFE) and investigation of what for them is “a Via Crucis”.
Patients will dye this March 15 three colors, which will wear the ribbon that represents their day: gray, which represents loss and mourning; the teal, of hope and support, and the black, which signifies the loneliness and isolation they feel.
As Isabelle Delgado, spokesperson for the Long Covid Euskal Herria Association, explained to Efe, patients and caregivers from all over the world seek with this campaign to increase the visibility of persistent covid, prevent new infections, empower those affected, share support and resources, educate about symptoms, and highlight the need to fund relevant research.
Among their demands are more training for doctors so that there can be global care and a unitary protocol to treat this disease, since they are currently “referred from one specialist to another.”
As prior to this anniversary, agreed by the associations of those affected around the world, and coinciding with the third anniversary of the confinement, representatives of the Spanish women read a manifesto yesterday to recall that “the nightmare continues, however, for almost two million citizens of this country.”
“Don’t leave us alone,” those affected by the persistent covid cry out, “a tangle of symptoms and diseases” that affect them differently, “a viacrucis of visits to doctors and endless diagnostic tests, a coming and going of efforts with the administration, a reduction” of his previous life and, sometimes, “a non-life”.
Like that of Laura Martínez, who caught the coronavirus almost at the beginning of the pandemic, when she was about to get married and today, three years later, going to a doctor’s office or to an act “means four or five days of recovery on the sofa- bed”, he tells in conversation with EFE.
Before, she was a telemarketer, but now she is fighting to have her disability recognized: “How do you expect me, who find it hard to stay focused and get tired, to talk 30 hours a week, ask for data and manage a computer program if I often Am I not even capable of dressing myself?” asks the young woman from Valdeorras (Ourense).
As he explains, the majority of those affected are discharged or, hopefully, temporarily disabled after a year, “without any evidence of anything indicating that we are going to improve.”
“Doing something as basic as getting dressed, cleaning ourselves or making a bed by ourselves is having a good day,” he says; a bad day is summed up in going from the sofa to bed and making do with it”. The worst thing is that she does not see a horizon for improvement: “They do control analyzes on us, expectations that we are going to improve? Although it sounds sad, the truth is, few”.
The persistent covid has affected 17 million Europeans in the first two years of the pandemic and the number continues to increase, according to data transferred yesterday by the European Commissioner for Health, Stella Kyriakides, to the ministers of the Twenty-seven.
“One in eight people experience symptoms that last longer than expected. People are left with a variety of physical and psychological symptoms, such as fatigue, shortness of breath or depression,” Kyriakides said during a council of European health ministers held in Brussels.
According to the World Health Organization, patients who have not fully recovered at least two months after infection suffer from persistent covid and account for between 10 and 20% of patients affected by the coronavirus.
The European Commission is creating a network of national experts to “address challenges related to the management of long-term covid,” added Kyriakides, who noted that much progress has been made in understanding this disease but stressed that it is necessary to continue deepening.
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