Three New Hampshire residents are navigating their fourth or fifth year with long COVID in 2026, and for at least two of them, the path forward has grown harder, not easier.
Kate Harmon Siberine, Nenia Ballard, and Wendy Thomas each contracted COVID-19 and never fully recovered. Their stories, first reported in early 2025, offer a window into the uneven and often invisible burden long COVID continues to place on patients across the state.
Long COVID, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a chronic illness following COVID-19 infection that persists for at least three months. Symptoms range from brain fog and fatigue to fainting and muscle weakness. The condition affects patients differently, and medical researchers still do not fully understand why some people develop it while others recover quickly.
Siberine, who lives in Goffstown, marked four years with the condition on January 1. A former Episcopal priest with congregations in Concord and Franklin, she now uses a wheelchair and is mostly bedbound. Brain fog, fainting, and muscle weakness forced her to step away from her preaching duties in February 2024. She said she has tried at least 10 new medications in the past year, but none produced meaningful improvement.
“I really wish I could tell you that things were drastically improved,” Siberine told the New Hampshire Bulletin. “Unfortunately, that has not been the case for me.”
What has shifted for Siberine is her approach to managing the illness. She said she has learned to pace herself more deliberately, conserving energy before and after activities to focus on what matters most to her.
“My symptoms and their severity remain the same,” she said. “But I would say what has improved is I’ve learned a lot more about how to pace and manage so that I can prioritize the things that are most important to me and rest really well, both in anticipation and recovery.”
Siberine said she is now “just waiting for the science and research to catch up.” But she expressed concern that recent federal policy shifts have slowed that process. The Trump administration’s early 2025 actions disrupted American biomedical research, creating additional uncertainty for patients who were already relying on the hope of future treatments.
The experiences of the three women reflect the unpredictable nature of long COVID. Nenia Ballard, of Canaan, has seen her condition worsen over the past year. Wendy Thomas, of Merrimack, has experienced some improvement. That variance is itself one of the most challenging aspects of the illness. Patients, doctors, and policymakers cannot point to a single trajectory or treatment protocol because the condition does not follow one.
For Siberine, Ballard, and Thomas, what remains consistent is the uncertainty. Each is managing a condition that medicine does not yet fully explain, with treatments that remain largely experimental, in a political environment that has complicated research funding and federal health agency operations.
Siberine has found one outlet through social media. She led a virtual Ash Wednesday worship service on TikTok, continuing her ministry in the limited ways her condition allows. It is a small adaptation, but it speaks to a broader pattern among long COVID patients: finding ways to remain present in the world without the physical capacity they once had.
Long COVID sits at the intersection of public health, disability policy, and medical research. For patients like Siberine, the stakes of federal research investment are not abstract. They are measured in years of illness, in medications that don’t work, and in a life restructured around an illness that arrived and never left.
New Hampshire’s three long COVID patients are not outliers. Millions of Americans live with the condition, and their ability to access effective treatment depends heavily on whether researchers can develop a clearer picture of the illness. That picture, Siberine suggested, is taking longer to develop than it should.
Four years in, she is still waiting.
