This symptom might mean you had COVID-19

The novel coronavirus has been well known for creating long-lasting effects on people’s bodies. Infected people have experienced symptoms for months, in fact.

• And there’s one symptom, according to one expert, that might suggest you had COVID-19 without knowing it.

What’s going on?

Dr. Leann Poston, a licensed physician and health adviser for Invigor Medical, recently told BestLife that fatigue is a post-viral symptom that might indicate people were recently infected with a virus.

• Fatigue, she said, is “exhaustion that is not relieved by sleep.”
• “Inflammation of the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that regulates many bodily functions such as sleep, appetite, body temperature and hormone release, leads to the severe fatigue that people with prolonged symptoms of COVID are reporting,” Poston told BestLife.
• She also said that “difficulty concentrating and brain fog” can be another sign you might have been infected with COVID-19.

More on ‘brain fog’

Back in October 2020, researchers expressed concern about brain fog, which I wrote about for the Deseret News. Dr. Shruti Agnihotri, a neurologist at the University of Alabama Birmingham, told ABC 33/40 that patients suffered severe headaches and memory loss because of brain fog.

• “Often times these patients may have even recovered from the initial fever and shortness of breath symptoms and they continue to have very severe headaches and tend to often complain about memory loss, often referred to as a brain fog.”

The symptoms, she said, are similar to what you experience from a concussion.

• “Patients often times describe difficulty with attention, focus, just not feeling right, not as sharp as they have otherwise been. We sometimes see these symptoms in many other conditions, during post-concussion, and we also see them after various other infections too,” Agnihotri told ABC 33/40.