Long COVID Can Happen to Anyone

Rachel Nussbaum

on January 07, 2026

This post is part of a new blog series focusing on Long COVID. The author, Rachel Nussbaum, is a Master of Public Health and COVID-19 long-hauler, with three years of lived experience with Long COVID. Through this series, WHN aims to raise awareness of Long COVID and long-hauler experiences, as well as the implications of the disease for public health.

What comes to mind when you picture someone in the Marines? Personally, you say “Marines,” I think, “self discipline.” Going by the eligibility requirements, it’s probably someone super determined, and in fantastic shape. Makes sense: The website says that officers have to be between 20 and 28-years old, able to complete more than a dozen push-ups within 2 minutes, lift a 30-pound ammunition can over their heads until their elbows lock out, and run a mile and a half within 15 minutes. 

So to put it lightly, Marines are in pretty good physical form (my cat is 13 pounds, and you couldn’t pay me to lift him over my head). From that baseline, you’d think they would be some of the people most likely to fully recover from a COVID-19 infection. 

“Before Long COVID, I was the definition of active,” one veteran wrote on social media. “Marine-trained discipline, hours in the gym, cardio that hit 175 BPM, and a hospitality career built on motion, precision, and presence. I ran trails, traveled, [and] loved meeting new people. I lived independently and on my feet. Then came my third COVID infection.”

Even within such an active group, her story isn’t an anomaly. A peer-reviewed 2024 study in The Lancet Regional Health Americas found that out of 899 young and healthy Marines, a fourth of them went on to develop Long COVID after infection [1]. Most of those people had mild symptoms in the up-front infection stage, and over a third of them hadn’t felt sick at all — one of the aspects I find most chilling about the virus. 

Still, even they weren’t safe from the lasting impacts of COVID-19. And while it’s tempting to think that vaccines have made the risk of Long COVID negligible, the study recruited participants when vaccination was mandatory for Marines; by the second follow-up, the majority of the included people were vaccinated (though the people who remained unvaccinated were more likely to have Long COVID symptoms). A separate NIH study, looking at 6.4 million American electronic health records from 2020–2024, found no meaningful decline in the risk of Long COVID over time [2].

Long COVID: It’s Like “Watching Life Pass Me By”

It’s difficult to overstate the devastation and loss of going from fully abled, to limited by something outside of your control. As Twitter/X user and powerlifter Alex Sprackland shared on social media in March, “Today is my 5-year #longcovid anniversary. It might be the hardest one so far. There is still no treatment. I don’t even know what is specifically wrong with me. I am a shell of the person I was. Half a decade of my life, gone to this illness,” he wrote. “[I’m] watching life pass me by.” 

Sprackland shared two photos with his message. In one, he smiles and holds a certificate of his barbell competition win in the winter of 2020, inscribed with his winning 190-kg deadlift and 92.5-kg bench weight (for my fellow Americans, that’s a 419-lb deadlift and 204-lb bench). In the second photo, he looks at the camera from a wheelchair.

The sad truth is, Long COVID can happen to anyone. I understand some people’s reluctance to believe it — who can say they haven’t wished for a timeline where unfair, terrible things might happen to other people, but the cartoon anvil misses your head, since the universe knows you’re already balancing enough? The idea of walking around with a disaster-repellant coating is tempting, and so typical for main characters in movies and books, people coined the phrase “plot armor” as shorthand for the set-up. As in, Frodo can’t die with 200 pages of the book left. He’s got plot armor. 

So even as many people can now agree that “I trust my immune system to fully protect me” wasn’t the wisest approach before COVID-19 vaccines were available, there’s still this belief that vaccines and “plot armor” alone will ward off Long COVID, and the other scientifically proven, lasting consequences of infection, like the increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, brain damage, myalgic encephalomyelitis, and hearing loss [3-8]. Yet being the main character of your story, or at the top of your game, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll remain unscathed. 

“Looking back on my life prior to Long COVID feels surreal,” a social media user who goes by MB wrote on 2024’s Long Covid Awareness Day. “[I] was a former athlete with an active lifestyle, and now I’m almost completely housebound. Still zero effective treatments.” 

And post-infection myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) — which some studies suggest may affect a substantial number of people with Long COVID, though estimates vary by study and criteria — can be profoundly disabling and, in the most severe cases, life-threatening [22-25]. “Becca’s tongue started to have a lot of issues. For three weeks, she’s been getting less than 500 calories a day,” Stephen Fortuna, Becca’s husband and caretaker, tells the camera in “What Doesn’t Kill You,” a documentary on myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and Long COVID. He carefully helps her eat meal replacement liquid from a syringe while lying down in a dark room, and then we see older footage: Becca goofing around in the snow pre-illness, her long hair free, skin flushed, sled in hand. 

“She’s suffering basically constantly,” Stephen says. “Becca has wanted to die a lot of the time. Do I listen to what she told me, that she doesn’t want a feeding tube? And I just have to let her waste away in bed?” We see Becca now: Still, lying emaciated in a dark bedroom with her knees elevated, staring at the ceiling. 

Why Is This Happening?

It’s the elephant in the room: As helpful as current vaccines are for decreasing the risk of death upon initial COVID-19 infection, they don’t fully prevent the elevated post-infection risks of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, cancer, and brain damage, and they don’t eliminate the risk of Long COVID’s other forms. As much as we all wish vaccines did neutralize the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2, people’s lived experiences, and the data, show that’s not the case [7]. 

Studies do show that vaccination helps decrease the likelihood of Long COVID for many people, and the more doses someone receives, the lower their risk falls [2,9]. But absorbing those facts without context provides a false sense of security, as the more COVID-19 infections someone experiences, the higher their risk of Long COVID climbs — and SARS-CoV-2 continues circulating year round, often at high levels [10,11]. With twice-yearly waves of the virus burning through our communities, corporation-influenced government COVID-19 policies that primarily promote — and only supply — vaccinations have disabled hundreds of millions of people. And they’re demolishing all of our quality of life, and kids’ mortality rates, in the process [12]. 

Marines, college students, kids, and even a two-time Olympian now reckon with newly limited abilities after COVID-19 infections, and the virus’s frequent mutations, plus our bodies’ short-lived antibodies following infection, keep adding to that number [13,14,18]. I know it can be hard to accept, but no one is invincible to COVID-19’s lasting impacts. Even if the initial illness just felt like a cold — or was unnoticeable altogether [15].

It Hides in Plain Sight

When seeing (or feeling) is believing, it’s even harder to accept Long COVID’s reach when, unsettlingly, the virus can impact our ability to even recognize we’ve changed. To that point, one study found that infected volunteers had statistically lower cognitive scores compared to uninfected people, both in the initial disease stage and a year later [16]. 

Despite the objective findings, none of the volunteers reported persistent subjective cognitive symptoms — they felt like they were functioning the same as ever. Another study followed people for two years after infection, and corroborated the phenomenon [17]. While a majority of the participants experienced some form of cognitive impairment, 20 percent of them had few or no complaints about a worsened long-term memory, despite objective evidence of it. The study’s authors wrote that this could suggest post-viral anosognosia — a condition in which a person with a disability is cognitively unaware of having it, due to an underlying physical condition.

“As an academic with Long COVID since March of 2020 who has struggled to do my job due to [cognitive]/brain dysfunction, I am floored at how little attention the post-viral brain damage piece of this is getting,” Bluesky user Camille Buckner wrote on the platform. “Students are forfeiting their brains/thinking to AI *and* to repeat C19 infections. It’s tragic.”

A Bluesky user responded to Buckner, writing, “It’s extremely obvious to me that everyone around me, (myself included), is having trouble with words, expressing themselves, making simple errors, missing key points. All the pundits on TV literally say phrases wrong and substitute awkward words.”

It’s scary. Some people might argue that in a way, it’s lucky those people aren’t recognizing their cognitive changes or connecting them to the virus, raising the “ignorance is bliss” stance. And perhaps this disconnect between experiencing changes and recognizing them adds to people’s faith in plot armor, if it seems like people are just “randomly” driving worse and getting sick more, without the people they know connecting their health changes to infections. 

Just like governments were reluctant to grapple with HIV, institutional COVID denialism (influenced by corporate profits), is also a factor. But like anyone who’s experienced a bear ransacking their camp food will agree, denial to an ongoing threat just invites more danger. 

Gambling With Kids’ Futures, Freedom, and What Makes You, “You” 

Personally, a bout of COVID-19 that triggered POTS and months of chest pain first brought my attention to the risks of Long COVID, so it’s sinister that the virus can play with people’s perception this way. But the bottom line? As the stories above and a king’s ransom of studies show, writing Long COVID off as something that’s not a concern for everyone paves the way for disaster. 

“I had worked full-time after [my] first bout of COVID-19, but the second infection ensured that I would be unable to function for months,” WHN member Marisa Swanson recently wrote. She’s one of a staggering 400 million people to experience the condition globally, including 45 to 48 million people in the U.S. [12.19]. At least 6 million American kids have their futures in peril [20]. Within just six years, that number staggeringly now surpasses the number of children with asthma. 

“I felt like I had lost my entire personality, everything I cared about,” one long-hauler wrote on social media. “I described it as feeling like I had a lobotomy, or early onset dementia. Suicidal, the lot. [I] haven’t worked in three years.” They went from reading a book every two days and editing documents “the length of War and Peace,” to not being able to read or write a sentence. 

While Long COVID’s severity can range, pulling the short stick leaves some unable to work, throwing their access to food, healthcare, and a roof over their heads into question [21]. With the American government’s criminalizing of unhoused people, it even endangers their freedom. 

“Trying to find some help in town for a friend of mine whose life is falling apart from long COVID,” a Bluesky user recently posted. “Pretty bleak out there when it comes to support services, but I did find a non-profit that will help her clean her house. Told her about it, but she won’t accept the help 😞.” 

How We Can Make History

No one is immune to COVID-19’s lasting damage, just like no one is untouchable when they get behind a wheel drunk, walk into a room hazy with second-hand smoke, or live near a pollution-emitting factory. But just like communities across the U.S. fought to get themselves and their children indoor air free from secondhand smoke — and before that, seatbelts, and sewage-free water — we can do the same. By masking, cleaning the air of SARS-CoV-2 with good ventilation, HEPA filters, and upper-room UVC light, testing, and spreading the word about why everyone benefits from avoiding airborne infections, we can turn the tide.

One of the reasons people join the Marines is the bond that comes from serving together, facing hard challenges while watching each other’s backs. A similar sense of community, solidarity, and appreciation washes over me whenever I see another masker on the street. We know what we’re up against, and it’s hard to endure (understatement), but the fight for our lives, each other, and the health of future generations is worth adapting for. 

Being able to crouch down and rub my cat’s cheeks without losing consciousness, keeping my POTS from escalating to where I’m forced to crawl to the bathroom, the smiling eye contact between maskers going their separate ways, and the comradery of mask blocs members on the same page — Long COVID awareness takes strength, but I have to salute the things it gives. As a millennial, I think Cadet Kelly would be proud.

Citations: 

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