GH’s Emma Samms Opens up About Living With Long COVID

When Emma Samms made a surprise appearance on General Hospital back in September 2020, it was originally meant to be part of an actual return to the soap. But the lockdown in early 2020 and the ongoing COVID pandemic put the kibosh on it for a while, resulting in Holly only being seen in a quick shot of a security monitor (which was shot in the guest room of her home in the U.K.!).

Additionally, Samms caught COVID for the first time back in March 2020 and soon found herself one of the sufferers of what has become known as Long COVID, ongoing health issues caused by exposure to the virus. So it wasn’t until two years later, in October 2022, that she felt well enough to travel to the US and actually play Holly again for a handful of episodes.

Now, returning once more for another run, Samms remains grateful to GH for making it possible for her to work in her condition. “If it wasn’t for the fact that people at General Hospital are so understanding and accommodating, I would not be able to work like I do,” she admitted to Variety. “When I’m back in the U.K., and anytime I’m not on the set, I have to lie down, I have to put my feet up. I have something called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, so if I stand too long, I keel over. So the only cure, or the only thing that makes you feel a bit better, is to lie down flat.

“The powers that be at General Hospital accommodate that, but not every production would,” she added. “They write most of my scenes sitting down. They’ve put me in a dressing room that’s really close to the elevator. Just lots of little things like that that mean I can do the job.”

Samms is just one of the millions around the world that researchers suspect are suffering from Long COVID. “It’s been like this now for four and a half years nearly,” she confided, “and it’s baffling to not just the people who have it, but it’s baffling to the doctors. They are some very smart people who are investigating and studying it and doing research, but all they keep finding is more and more damage that COVID has done to people’s bodies.

“I got some really good scans done and they found that at some point I had myocarditis, which has scarred my heart,” Samms added. “The consequences of COVID — I think we still have only just scratched the surface, and it’s terrifying to me that people think we are no longer in a pandemic. Because they so desperately want it to not affect them, they sort of pretend that it has gone, and it so hasn’t.”