This is the Guardian.

Today, it's a condition that two million people across the UK are suffering with.

So why are people with long COVID struggling to be believed?

At shortness of breath, chronic fatigue, cognitive impairment or neuro fatigue.

I can't hold things, I can't open things, I can't rub my son's back when I'm putting him to sleep.

So initially I couldn't even climb a flight of stairs, lots of muscle aches, joint pains.

How fatigued would you say your legs are? They are. Exhausted.

I actually really upset.

If you've had COVID, you'll probably remember how it feels to be unfathomably tired,

struggling for breath to lose your sense of taste or smell.

Those experiences can be scary, but for most of us they pass within a week or two.

For the two million people in this country with long COVID however, the symptoms are still going on,

months or even years later. It's depressing, it's really what it is.

Nobody can really understand or relate to you except somebody else who's had the same problem.

From the outside, it's not always clear to see how much people are struggling.

A big part of it is this feeling of being believed and validated because you start to think,

am I crazy, am I imagining these things?

There are support groups online for people with long COVID, whose members number in the tens of

thousands. They describe how it feels in words like lonely, debilitating, forgotten.

People with long COVID don't know when or whether they'll regain the health they had before.

They don't know and doctors can't really tell them either.

It's a race of passage for everybody who has long COVID, at what point do you realise that

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