A recent NHS video depicts the struggle of three apparently healthy individuals as part of an initiative to improve vaccine acceptance.
Quincy Dwamena, 31, claimed he delayed getting a Covid shot and ended up in the hospital with a severe case of the illness, thinking that he was going to die.
Over 360,000 people in the 16 and 17-year age group in England received at least one dose of the vaccine.
Other teenagers of that age group in England are invited to book an appointment with their GP or go to a walk-in center to get their shots.
In the video, Dwamena, a resident of East London, spoke about himself as a “healthy young guy who went to the gym often,” who unfortunately postponed getting the vaccine for too long and became dangerously ill.
“My advice is to get the vaccine: don’t put yourself and others at risk, I wish I’d got mine as soon as it was offered,” Dwamena said.
Megan Higgins, 25, and Hella Harwood, aged 23, seemed like two healthy and active girls who are now the victims of extreme fatigue because of long Covid.
Ms. Higgins declared that, eight months after falling ill, she “can’t even walk around the shops without getting exhausted.”
In the interview with BBC Breakfast, she said that on bad days she suffers from pain all over her joints and a feeling of severe exhaustion from when she wakes up to when she goes to sleep.
“One of the things I really notice is my emotional resilience… when you’re that tired everything hits you so much harder,” she added.
She described having a knot at the end of her hair that she couldn’t comb out because of her inability to keeping her hands above her head for long enough.
Ms. Harwood, an illustrator and London resident, said that she’s been bed-bound for a total of seven months and is afraid that she will never “be the same again.”
She was even more surprised by the effects of the illness as she was “fit and healthy” and “had literally no conditions.”
She was so scared by Covid during the seven months of illness that she was afraid that she was going to die that year.
“My advice to anyone really, young and old, would be to get the vaccine because it’s a naive way of thinking that you’re invincible just because you’re fit and healthy and you eat the right stuff,” Harwood said.