The trucker cap in teacher Amy Watson’s selfie from the day she was tested for COVID-19 later inspired her choice of “long-haulers” to describe COVID survivors with persistent symptoms. “My school’s mascot is a squirrel,” she said, which she finds appropriate, given that her pre-school students, with their short bursts of activity, are “very squirrel-like.”
The coronavirus pandemic has breathed new life into a commonplace trucking term: long-hauler. It's now used to describe COVID-19 survivors who continue to suffer various symptoms, sometimes debilitating, long after their original infection has passed.
Not only was the time aspect of long haul a big part of this verbal morphing, but a trucker cap played a role. That’s where Amy Watson comes in.
The Portland, Oregon, preschool teacher got sick March 15, as the virus was spreading rapidly and lockdowns were beginning. She had flu-like symptoms and a dry, unproductive cough, typical of COVID.
“After laying at home a couple of weeks, I threw on my favorite squirrel trucker cap and drove to get tested,” Watson said. She took a selfie with the cap and posted it on her Facebook page April 11. “A couple of days later I learned I had COVID.” Her condition never required hospitalization, so she assumed she’d make a full recovery.
A month after getting sick, that wasn’t happening, so she began searching online for support groups. The ones she found weren’t limited to COVID survivors and their families. Also, “folks on there weren’t very nice or supportive,” she recalled, so she decided to launch her own Facebook page.
“Looking around, I saw my hat on the coffee table,” she said. Watson realized the “long haul” concept – common to trucking and the unpredictably long journey of suffering that many COVID survivors were beginning to report – would be a perfect name for the Facebook support group. She named it Long Haul Covid Fighters, limiting it to COVID survivors who first experienced COVID prior to April 1.
