People with 'medium COVID' are caught in a gray area of recovery with little support

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/17/ [login to see] /long-covid-symptoms
Waves of fatigue. The inability to smell milk that has gone bad. A racing heartbeat. These are just a few COVID-19 symptoms that can linger after an initial coronavirus infection. Though they may not always amount to the debilitating cases of long COVID-19 that can leave people bedridden or unable to perform daily functions, it's very common to take weeks to fully recover — a condition I've been thinking of as "medium COVID."

I've been reporting on COVID-19 since the coronavirus pandemic started, and I thought I knew what an infection would be like for a young, otherwise healthy person like me. I knew there was a risk for long COVID-19, even with mild cases, but in my mind, there were two types of COVID-19: run-of-the-mill cases that didn't last much longer than their isolation periods required, and long COVID-19, which was relatively rare.

Instead, like so many Americans, I found myself caught somewhere in between.

With record numbers of Americans contracting the coronavirus during the recent omicron surge, many have discovered that recovery has not always happened as quickly as they've been led to expect. But does that mean they have long COVID-19?