#Recovered coronavirus patients report mystery pains months later

“What we are seeing is very frightening,” Prof. Gabriel Izbicki of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center told The Times of Israel.

“More than half the patients, weeks after testing negative, are still symptomatic.”

Rather than typical symptoms of COVID-19, however, many patients are reporting pain in completely unexpected places, Eran Schenker, the director of a clinic in the city Bnei Brak, told the paper.

“It can appear in the arms, legs, or other places where the virus doesn’t have a direct impact,” Schenker said.

“If you ask about the pain level on a 1 to 10 scale, can be 10, with people saying they can’t get to sleep,” he told the paper.

“Some of them had coronavirus in March, so they may have been recovered for months,” he stressed, saying the long-term pains do not correlate with how seriously ill they were while infected.

“We do scans and can’t see anything, but they have this pain — we’re told about it again and again,” he said.

One 55-year-old man who had coronavirus in March now “feels like he’s broken,” his wife told the paper — even though he tested negative for COVID-19 last month.

“He’s actually worse than he was when he was hospitalized,” she told the paper, saying he is so fatigued he can hardly walk.

Like with almost everything connected to the coronavirus, the complete novelty of the symptoms make them almost impossible to treat.

“Painkillers block the pain but don’t relieve the source, but we don’t know how to address the source and you can’t be on painkillers the rest of your life,” Schenker said.