From New York Times, I'm Michael Lombaro. This is Daily.

Today, even as rapidly expanding vaccinations offer a pathway out of the pandemic.

There is a small group of people for whom the virus's lingering effects never seem to end.

My colleague, Pam Beleg, on a rare and cruel case of long COVID.

It's Monday, March 22.

Yeah, I'm going to try really hard not to get emotional because I haven't talked about this since it happened.

But we'll take your time and wherever you want to start, just fine with me.

Yeah. Pam, tell me about Ivan.

Ivan Agerton is 50 years old. He lives on Bainbridge Island outside of Seattle with his wife Emily

and their three children. He's a former Marine and he has an incredibly cool job.

You're getting into this whole documentary natural history world.

He is a photographer and he does a lot of adventure photography and a lot of expeditions.

And it doesn't pay as much, but it's nice because I actually feel like I'm contributing to the

betterment of our planet. And his most recent expedition was last fall. He spent two months

in the Red Sea in a submarine. Wow. Doing photography and cinematography of all sorts of

natural wonders and things that they were discovering down there.

So he spent two months in a submarine in the middle of the pandemic.

Pretty intense. Yeah. I was taking a bunch of COVID tests. We quarantined before the expedition started

and then in order to get off the ship after the expedition was done, we had to test negative.

The team took a lot of very strict COVID precautions, lots of testing. He tests negative as the

expedition ends and he has to take two or three flights from Saudi Arabia to get back to Seattle.

And he gets home a little bit before Thanksgiving.

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