A 15-year-old spends up to 23 hours a day in bed

Fatigue, shortness of breath, cough, difficulty concentrating – symptoms of long Covid can severely limit those infected in daily life. This is also shown by an example from Germany.

A 15 year old can barely get out of bed. She was unable to go to school for a long time. She is “very vulnerable,” as she describes herself in her TikTok video posts.

The German teenager is giving an insight into her life with Long Covid on the platform. “Today the fatigue got so bad again that I no longer know how to walk to the bathroom […]», says the teenager, for example. She sometimes spends 23 hours a day in bed.

“A lot of healthy people can't even imagine what it's like,” the young woman says. The disease also caused her to develop postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS). People with this syndrome become extremely dizzy or even faint when they stand up.

Going to school like everyone else her age was no longer possible for the teenager. “I'm so sick,” she explained in one post. That's why she takes lessons at home several times a week – but only for 20 minutes each.

People in Switzerland are also affected by Long Covid. There are no accurate figures about the number of patients. Estimates vary widely – they range from 70,000 to 300,000.

There are also particularly dangerous cases. “We also looked after individual cases with such pronounced symptoms,” Rachid Garbo, chief psychosomatic physician at the Hochgebirgsklinik Davos, explains to Nau.ch. He has also seen patients who have developed POTS symptoms due to Long Covid.

However, the Germans' young age of 15 is somewhat unusual. “The literature describes that Long Covid is usually diagnosed between the ages of 36 and 50. This is also consistent with our observations,” says Jarboe.