Why So Many People Got Sick and Stayed Sick Since COVID

What is actually happening in your body, and why nobody has been able to explain it to you.

I am Bernadette Gold, an Integrative Healing Master Practitioner and Chronic Illness Specialist based outside San Antonio, Texas. I work with clients in-person and long-distance. For more than two decades, I have been helping people find what is actually driving their illness at its root and supporting their bodies in healing when conventional medicine has run out of answers.

Since 2020, something shifted. The people coming to me are sicker and more confused than ever before. They have been diagnosed with things like multiple sclerosis, interstitial cystitis, pancreatitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome, fibromyalgia, POTS, and a long list of other conditions that none of their doctors can connect to a single explanation. Many of them have been told their symptoms are stress, anxiety, or simply unexplained. Many have tried everything, and nothing has worked.

I want to tell you what I believe is actually happening. Not in medical language. In plain, simple terms that anyone can understand. Because when you understand what is going on in your own body, everything changes.

Almost Everyone Is Carrying a Hidden Passenger

Let me start with something that will probably surprise you. Almost every adult on the planet is carrying a virus called EBV, Epstein-Barr Virus. You have almost certainly never heard it called by that name. You might know it as the virus that causes mono, the kissing disease. Most people caught it as children, felt tired for a few weeks if they felt anything at all, and were told it was gone. But it was not gone. It never fully leaves.

Once EBV gets into your body, it finds a hiding place inside the very immune cells that are supposed to fight it. Think of your immune system as a large factory with workers inside. EBV slips past the gate, shows a fake ID, and sets up a secret office inside the factory itself. Now it is hiding inside the workers who are supposed to be fighting it. 

Once it is settled in, EBV does something clever. It doesn’t immediately start causing trouble. That would get it noticed. Instead, it goes into stealth mode. It tucks its instruction manual into a filing cabinet and just sits there, dormant, waiting.

Your immune system has its own security team, cells called T-cells and natural killer cells, whose job is to walk the factory floor and make sure nothing is out of place. As long as that security team is strong and fully staffed, EBV stays in its secret office, keeps quiet, and causes no obvious trouble. This is called latency.

But the moment that security team gets worn down, overwhelmed, or distracted by something else, EBV opens the filing cabinet, pulls out its instruction manual, and starts making copies of itself again. That is called reactivation. And what it does when it wakes up is the key to understanding a very large portion of the chronic illness explosion we have seen since 2020.

What EBV Does When It Wakes Up

When EBV reactivates, it doesn’t simply make you feel tired. It targets specific tissues and causes specific types of damage.

Imagine the nerves in your body as electrical wires. Each wire has a protective plastic coating called myelin that keeps the electrical signal clean and strong. EBV attacks that coating. When the coating on a wire gets damaged, the signal becomes noisy, weak, or painful. This is why people with reactivated EBV experience nerve pain, burning sensations, pain that moves around the body, and hypersensitivity to touch or temperature. The wires are damaged, the signals are misfiring.

EBV also attacks the connective tissue webbing that wraps around every muscle, organ, and joint in your body. When this tissue becomes inflamed and sticky from EBV activity, it creates the kind of diffuse body pain that your doctor cannot find on an X-ray or MRI because it’s not coming from a joint or a disc. It is coming from the tissue in between.

It inflames the lymph nodes, especially in the neck and throat, where it likes to live. A persistently swollen lymph node that never quite goes away is one of the most common signs that EBV is active.

And it keeps the immune system producing inflammatory chemicals on a slow, continuous burn. This creates the kind of fatigue that doesn’t get better with sleep. The kind of brain fog that makes it hard to find words or follow a conversation. The feeling of being constantly unwell without being obviously sick. You aren’t imagining it. Your immune system is genuinely on fire, just at a low level that doesn’t show up clearly on standard blood tests.

Why Stress and Grief Open the Door

This is the part that almost nobody explains, and it matters enormously.

When you go through something difficult, a bereavement, a prolonged period of stress, a trauma, a major life upheaval, your body produces a stress hormone called cortisol. In small amounts for short periods, cortisol is helpful. It helps you survive an emergency. But when cortisol stays elevated for weeks or months, as it does during sustained grief or chronic stress, it directly suppresses the security team cells that keep EBV quiet.

It’s like sending all the security guards home on indefinite leave. EBV has been waiting for exactly this moment. The door opens, and it walks out.

This is not psychosomatic; this is documented biology. Grief or stress causes measurable changes in immune cell counts. Those changes give EBV the opening it needs. The physical illness that follows is a real biological consequence of a real immune change. It isn’t a mental health problem wearing a physical costume.

In my practice, I see this pattern constantly. A major loss, a prolonged burnout, a traumatic event, and then six months to a year later, the health begins to unravel. What looks like multiple separate problems developing at once is often EBV reactivation cascading through multiple body systems simultaneously.

What the Research Confirms

A landmark study published in the journal Science in 2022, one of the most respected scientific journals in the world, followed over 10 million people and found that EBV infection was virtually a required step before multiple sclerosis developed. The risk of MS increased 32 times following EBV infection. This is peer-reviewed research confirming that a virus almost everyone carries is directly connected to one of the most serious neurological diseases we know.

A 2023 study published in the journal Cell found that EBV reactivation was common among long COVID patients and that the severity of fatigue and neurological symptoms in those patients correlated directly with the activity of their EBV. COVID doesn’t just cause its own illness. It wakes up something that was already waiting.

The Phone System That COVID Broke

Now, let me explain what COVID specifically did that changed everything for so many people.

Your brain and your immune system talk to each other constantly. One of the most important communication lines between them is a long nerve called the vagus nerve. Think of it as the main telephone cable running from your brain all the way down through your chest and into your belly. It connects your brain to your immune system, heart,  lungs, and gut.

One of the most important messages your brain sends down this cable is a “calm down” signal. When the immune system has been fighting something and the situation is coming under control, your brain sends a chemical message called acetylcholine down the vagus nerve. That message plugs into specific receptors on immune cells, including the cells that release histamine and cause allergic and/or inflammatory reactions. The message says: "Stand down, we have this handled, stop producing inflammatory chemicals.”

Those receivers are like telephone handsets that accept incoming calls from your brain. They are called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Without them working properly, your immune system never gets the stand-down message. It just keeps producing inflammation with nobody telling it to stop.

What the COVID Spike Protein Does to Those Receivers

Here is where COVID enters the story in a way that almost nobody is talking about in plain language.

The COVID spike protein acts like chewing gum jammed into those telephone receivers. Once it is stuck in there, the calm-down call from your brain cannot get through. The line is blocked.

Your brain keeps trying to make the call. It keeps producing acetylcholine and sending it down the vagus nerve. But the receivers are jammed. The message never arrives. And so, the immune system stays in emergency mode. It keeps producing inflammatory chemicals. The cells that release histamine, called mast cells, keep firing without restraint. The nervous system stays locked in a state of high alert, like a car alarm that goes off and nobody can turn it off.

This is the biological explanation for why so many people after COVID developed what looks like multiple separate conditions appearing at the same time. Fatigue that doesn’t improve with rest. Reactions to foods they used to eat without any problem. Skin flushing, hives, and rashes that seem to come from nowhere. Heart rate spikes on standing. Bladder pain and urgency. Digestive inflammation. Neurological symptoms, including brain fog, numbness, and pain. Anxiety or depression that arrived from nowhere. Insomnia doesn’t respond to anything.

These are not separate, unrelated problems. They are the downstream consequences of the same upstream disruption. The phone system is broken. Every organ system that depended on receiving the calm-down message is now running without it.

Nicotine Research

Something unexpected entered the research in the past few years that is worth understanding.

Nicotine, which most people associate only with cigarettes and addiction, has a completely different effect when it is delivered slowly through a patch rather than quickly through smoking. The rapid delivery through cigarettes is what creates the addictive effect. Slow-release low-dose nicotine through a patch is not significantly addictive in people who do not smoke, and multiple clinical trials have found it to be well tolerated.

Here is why it matters for this conversation. Nicotine uses the same receptors that the COVID spike protein jammed. And it uses them with much higher affinity, meaning it is a much stronger fit for those receptors than the spike protein is. When nicotine binds to those receptors, it pushes the spike protein out, clears the blocked handset, and allows the calm-down signal from the vagus nerve to get through again.

A 2025 review published on PubMed looked at the full body of evidence on this mechanism and reported results from a patient survey showing that 73.5% of long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome patients using low-dose nicotine patches reported significant improvement in their symptoms. The authors concluded it appears to be a promising and safe approach with no expected long-term harm.

This is emerging research, not a standard treatment. It is not appropriate for everyone, and it is not something to begin without understanding the full picture. In my practice, I present this information to clients where the clinical picture suggests it may be relevant. The decision to explore it is always entirely the client. Sometimes it fits. Often, other priorities come first. I mention it here because it is one of the most important and least discussed findings in post-COVID treatment, and the people suffering deserve to know it exists. 

When the Hidden Passenger and the Broken Phone Hit at the Same Time

Now put both pieces together, and you have the explanation for why so many people got dramatically worse after COVID and why they are still not getting better.

EBV had been sitting quietly in its secret office inside the immune system, kept in check by the security team. Then COVID arrived and did two things simultaneously. First, it jammed the phone lines so the brain could no longer send the calm-down message to the immune system. Second, it directly disrupted the security team cells that were keeping EBV quiet.

EBV sensed that security had been reduced and that the alarm system was down. It came out of dormancy and started causing damage again. Nerve tissue, connective tissue, and lymphatic tissue all began to be affected. At the same time, the immune system, unable to receive the stand-down message through the jammed receivers, could not mount an effective response to push EBV back into hiding. The mast cells kept firing. The inflammatory chemicals kept flowing. The body couldn’t return to baseline.

The result is what so many people are living with right now. Fatigue so deep, sleep doesn’t help. Pain that migrates around the body and defies explanation. Brain fog that steals words and concentration. A nervous system so sensitized that everyday sounds, smells, and foods trigger reactions. A bladder that is constantly inflamed. A digestive system that is perpetually upset. A heart rate that behaves erratically. Neurological symptoms that every specialist looks at and says are outside their area.

These are not separate diseases that happened to arrive at the same time. They are one story. EBV reactivated, the phone system broke, and multiple body systems lost their regulation simultaneously. The person ends up in multiple specialist offices with multiple diagnoses, and nobody is connecting the dots because nobody is looking at the whole picture at once.

Why Mainstream Medicine Keeps Missing It

The research I have described above is published in major peer-reviewed journals. It is not fringe science. So why are millions of people still being told their symptoms are unexplained, or that they need to manage their stress better, or that there is nothing more to be done?

The honest answer is that the medical system was not built for this kind of illness, and the reasons are structural rather than personal.

When you go to a cardiologist, they look at your heart. When you go to a neurologist, they look at your nervous system. When you go to a gastroenterologist, they look at your gut. Each specialist is trained to look at their system in isolation. Nobody is trained to stand back and ask what single upstream event could be causing problems in all of these systems at the same time. The medical system is organized by organ and by diagnosis. The illness these patients have is organized by mechanism and crosses every organ boundary simultaneously.

The average time from publication of a medical finding to its implementation in standard clinical practice is 17 years. SEVENTEEN YEARS! The COVID pandemic produced a wave of important new findings in a compressed timeframe. The institutional machinery that translates research into clinical guidelines has not moved at anywhere near that speed.

Chronic fatigue syndrome in particular carries decades of institutional stigma. For most of its documented history, it was dismissed as a psychological condition. The doctors who spent years trying to prove it was biological fought against significant resistance. That cultural attitude doesn’t simply disappear because long COVID arrived with the same picture in millions of people simultaneously. The same mindset that dismissed fatigue syndrome patients for decades is still influencing how post-COVID illness is approached in many clinical settings.

And finally, the most effective approaches for these conditions cannot be put in a pill and sold. They require someone to sit with you, understand your full story, and figure out what your specific body needs. That is not something a pharmaceutical company can package and profit from. So, it doesn’t get funded. It doesn’t get researched at the scale it deserves. And it doesn’t make its way into the doctor's office where you are sitting and expecting for answers.

Why There Is No Single Protocol and Why That Matters

I want to say something that I think is important for anyone reading this who is still searching for answers.

There is no single protocol that works for everyone presenting with post-COVID chronic illness. Not for ME/CFS. Not for MCAS. Not for MS or interstitial cystitis or pancreatitis or any of the other conditions I see in complex chronic illness clients. Anyone offering you a fixed protocol for these conditions is not seeing you. They are seeing your diagnosis.

The reason so many people are not getting better, even with integrative approaches, is that they are being handed a protocol rather than receiving an assessment. A protocol says, "Here is the plan for your diagnosis." An assessment says let me understand your specific history, your specific combination of factors, your specific terrain, and then decide together what your body needs.

This is why I think mainstream medicine keeps failing these patients. A system built around diagnoses and standardized protocols is structurally unable to see the person. Traditional Chinese Medicine understood something that Western medicine largely forgot. You do not treat the disease. You treat the person in front of you. The disease is simply the expression of an imbalance that is unique to that individual. When you understand the imbalance and address it at its source, the body no longer provides the terrain it needs to sustain the illness.

My approach begins by analyzing your unique terrain. That means looking at your complete history, including events years before your diagnosis, the infections you have carried, the exposures you have had, the emotional events that preceded your symptoms, your hormonal picture, your autonomic function, your gut health, and your nervous system state. Only after that full picture is clear does an approach emerge. And that approach is built specifically for you. It is not a template.

In practice, I use Advanced Biomagnetism Therapy and Rife Frequency Therapy alongside targeted supplement guidance. These modalities work at the level where these conditions actually live, at the electromagnetic and terrain level of the body, rather than chasing individual symptoms with individual interventions. Where the clinical picture suggests it is relevant and the client wants to explore it, I present the nicotine patch research clearly and honestly and leave the decision entirely with them. The client always decides.

The reason I see results with people who have tried everything else is not because I have discovered a better protocol. It is because I do not start with a protocol. I start with the person.

If This Is Your Story

If you have been living with symptoms that multiple specialists cannot explain, if you have a diagnosis that was supposed to give you answers but didn’t give you a path to recovery, or if you have been told your illness is stress or anxiety or simply unexplained, I want you to know something.

Your body is not broken or faulty. You are not imagining it. The biology described in this article is real, documented, and published in peer-reviewed research. The fact that it has not been explained to you is a failure of the system, not a reflection of your experience.

What you are experiencing has a story. Something happened that opened the door. Something else came in. The phone system got disrupted. Multiple systems lost their regulation at once. And now you are being seen by specialists who each look at one piece of the picture and cannot explain why nothing is working.

The path forward is not a new protocol applied to your diagnosis. It is a proper assessment of what is actually driving your specific presentation and a plan built from that assessment that supports your body's natural ability to stabilize, recover, and restore function.

If this resonates and you want to explore what that kind of assessment looks like for your situation, I work with clients in person outside San Antonio, Texas, and long-distance anywhere. The first step is a free consultation where we look at your picture together.

Learn more about how I work: https://www.bernadettegold.com/health

© 2026 Bernadette Gold. All rights reserved. You are welcome to share a link to this article. Reproducing or republishing the content in any form without written permission from the author is not permitted.