The pandemic has created a new group of patients, COVID “long haulers,” who suffer from a variety of ongoing symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog, anxiety and depression, coughing, shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, headaches, intermittent fever, joint and chest pain, and loss of taste and smell. Anybody who was infected is at risk of long COVID—regardless of the severity of their original illness—and all these symptoms are a result of the body’s inability to regain energetic balance, says Laurie R. Mallis, M.D., LAc, owner of SearchLight Medical, in Hopewell Junction.