GB’s Maia Lumsden and Tanysha Dissanayake fear for careers due to long Covid

Two of Britain’s brightest young tennis prospects fear their careers could be over because of the ongoing effects of long Covid.

Maia Lumsden, 24, will make a tentative return to competitive tennis next week 18 months after first testing positive for coronavirus, but that is a distant dream at the moment for Tanysha Dissanayake.

The 20-year-old, who was taking her first steps on the professional circuit prior to contracting Covid-19 last July, is barely able to do anything nine months on.

“For most of this year I’ve been completely bedbound. Just to speak to you today, I didn’t do anything the whole of the morning, didn’t do much yesterday. One of my friends came over the other day. I had to rest for five days after that.”

One thing that has kept the Surrey player going has been talking to Lumsden, who had a mild case of coronavirus in October 2020 before becoming very unwell several weeks later.

There was no timeline on when things would get better.- Maia Lumsden

“I was totally bedbound for a number of months,” the Scot said. “The first six months were tough. I had a lot of tests done and everything was fine but they just didn’t know a lot about it.

“There wasn’t any treatment or any medication that I could take. That was the really hard part, just not knowing what was going on and how badly it was affecting my body.

“As the months went on I was obviously desperate to try to get back to tennis so every now and then I would try to start, but it would make me more ill, basically I’d crash and I’d be back bedbound. There was no timeline on when things would get better.”

Lumsden, who reached a career-high ranking of 250 in October 2019, finally made it back onto court a year after testing positive, beginning with 15-minute