Good Morning Britain presenter Kate Garraway has revealed that her husband Derek Draper spends the majority of his days sleeping as he continues his recovery from coronavirus.
Draper spent a year in hospital after contracting COVID-19, eventually being allowed home in April, but he now requires near-constant care and suffers from extreme fatigue.
"People who have had it mildly are starting to argue that it's the same as flu, because flu can be devastating to people as well," Garraway said on today's GMB.
"But this is very different because flu doesn't give you this degree of organ damage. I mean, even when you look at some of the symptoms that people who have been double vaccinated suffer from - it's fatigue.
"Now fatigue, I used to think, was just being exhausted by getting up in the morning. But the fatigue that Derek has - I know that he's an extreme case because he's got multiple organ challenges - but even some with more milder cases... Derek is sleeping 20 out of 24 hours a day.
"He has 10 minute windows [of being awake]. And it's not like he's feeling a bit tired, he goes white, pale and it's like everything shuts down. So you don't want that kind of fatigue, even ruling out all the other things that people are suffering with so far."
According to the latest statistics, around 970,000 people in the UK are suffering from "long COVID", with around 40% of those people still experiencing symptoms more than a year after catching the virus.
Neil Wilkes
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