This grassroots group supports COVID-19 survivors around the world. Here’s what Canada’s social impact sector can learn.
Why It Matters
About 386,000 Canadians have recovered from COVID-19, and another 76,000 have active cases. With potential long-term physical, mental and even social impacts of having survived the virus, these hundreds of thousands, and many more, will likely need support for years into the future — and social impact organizations could support their recovery in a number of ways.
About six months after being diagnosed with COVID-19 (and recovering, ostensibly), Diana Berrent’s 12-year-old son was sitting on the couch watching TV when one of his front teeth spontaneously fell out of his mouth. He hadn’t knocked it on anything and it hadn’t been loose. And curiously, there was no blood. Berrent took her son to the dentist, who was just as confused. “He was like, ‘It should look like a murder scene,’” she says.
Out of curiosity, Berrent made a post in the Survivor Corps Facebook group — a grassroots organization she founded to bring together survivors of COVID-19, with about 130,000 members from around the world including 3,000 Canadians. ”The answers were flooding in,” she says, from survivors claiming to have had the same experience: losing an adult tooth inexplicably and without any blood loss.
While there aren’t any
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