Future of 'life-changing' COVID-19 recovery program for long-haulers uncertain

Each morning, Denise Morneau drinks her coffee hoping it will be the day she can taste it. Morneau is what's become known as a COVID-19 long-hauler.

Valentine's Day last year, she fell ill and spent three weeks in bed. Sixteen months later, she still can't smell or taste anything. She also has other lingering, life-altering after effects. 

"I have been left now without any sense of taste or smell. And I have this huge pressure behind my eyes, which I feel like somebody is trying to push my eyes out of my head," said Morneau.

"And I'm an active person: I always have been. I might be 80, but I'm not one of those sit-in-the-chair kind of people. So it has been tough in that direction... It has impacted me greatly. There is no question about that. I just find it extremely, you know, extremely difficult."

Morneau is seeking help at the COVID-19 Recovery Program run through Windsor's Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare (HDGH). 

The program has pulled in staff from various disciplines, from psychologists to physiotherapists, to help long-haulers cope with their post-COVID reality. 

Morneau says the mental supports and group sessions have been a life-saver. 

"They have classes. One can be on grief and depression because, you know, through something like this, there's grief because we've lost the person that we are," said Morneau. 

The recovery program at HDGH is approaching its first anniversary. The hospital's CEO says it costs in the range of $450,000 a year to run the program. He says it can't continue long-term without the province putting up some money.

"At this point, the funding for any COVID recovery program in the province of Ontario has been left to the hospitals," said Bill Marra, CEO of HDGH.

"So we've been funding it internally for the first little while. It wasn't as challenging because we had to shut down a number of our out-patient programs because of COVID. So as we redeployed staff, we were able to pull the resources together... But going forward, it won't be sustainable."

More than 150 people with long COVID have been assisted through the HDGH program. Most are COVID survivors like Morneau, who were never treated in hospital.

According to Marra, only 17 per cent of the patients in the recovery program were hospitalized when they fell sick with COVID-19, and just nine percent were in the ICU. They include people like Nabil Alzubaidi and Wayne Martin.

The last few years were especially hard for Alzubaidi. He came to Windsor as a refugee from Palestine six years ago. He worked as a cab driver and was eventually able to bring over his wife and nine children. One year before the pandemic, he lost his wife to cancer. Then in the fall of 2020, he was hospitalized with COVID-19.