Long Covid: Upending lives, Patients’ symptoms dismissed & rights trampled on, Stifling economic potential, and more
Bonus still more What are we even doing?
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter! Things are settling down, I think we’re done with two issues per week for a while.
Our mini-theme this week is Long Covid and its effects on people and societies. From patients, lives and work in turmoil, getting gaslit, excluded from public spaces and having their rights trampled, all the way to the impact on the economy. I hope these readings help contextualize the state of the world and maybe even provide some food for thought for others in our networks.
And speaking of contextualizing, it seems to me that nothing speaks to the current pandemic moment more than a couple of recent stories. First up, candidate for Worst Covid Story of the Year, the recent NPR article where the author struggles with whether or not it’s worthwhile keeping her husband safe. Hint: it is, but somehow she’s not sure. Not only that, but the death from Covid of Paul Alexander also hits hard. Alexander survived over 70 years in an iron lung after being afflicted with polio as a child. Somehow, as a society if we can’t keep someone like that safe, what does it say about how hard we’ll try and keep our own vulnerable populations safe, now and in the future. What a world we live in.
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Long COVID and Post-COVID Conditions / Pandemic Patients
For many people, being exposed to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) results in illness characterized by mild symptoms, resolving in a matter of days or weeks. In fact, research has found that 30-60% of COVID-19 cases may be entirely asymptomatic (Shang et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2023). However, that is not the only potential outcome, and each infection is a new opportunity for long-term symptoms to develop (Bowe et al., 2022).
Disabled people's exclusion from indoor spaces is a civil rights violation, not an annoyance by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
Instead of confronting the injustice of a “new normal” that excludes medically vulnerable people, NPR seeks to deny that this injustice exists at all. For this reason, they platform an individual who sees her husbands’ new social limitations as an irritation he is personally inflicting on her, rather than an institutional problem being inflicted on all of us. …
This article is not merely an upsetting look at an individual’s victim-blaming mindset about her husband’s indefinite exclusion from public spaces. It is a piece of propaganda intended to further the perception that demands for COVID mitigation are unreasonable complaints, rather than critical activism for basic public health infrastructure.
Four years later, long COVID continues to upend lives in Quebec by Jesse Feith / Montreal Gazette
Sylvie Gagnon has been struggling with the symptoms of long COVID since early 2023, when she caught the virus for a fourth time since the outset of the pandemic.
A business development manager, Gagnon has been off work ever since. Needing help with daily tasks, she’s had to move in with her son and daughter-in-law.
On the few days she manages to leave the house in Vaudreuil-Dorion, she wears sunglasses and earmuffs — the condition has played havoc with her senses, leaving her hypersensitive to light and noise. Her pressure spikes without warning. Any exercise causes extreme fatigue. …
As is stands, Statistics Canada estimates about 15 per cent of people who contract COVID-19 will become long haulers and still have symptoms more than three months later.
Last June, the agency said some 2.1 million people in the country were experiencing long-term symptoms.
The Magnetic Fields Frontman Stephin Merritt on Lil Nas X, Long COVID, and the Legacy of ‘69 Love Songs’ by Samantha Allen / Them
I never thought of that. That is a strange thing to be accosted with in public. On the topic of the Village, apart from friends and family, you were one of the first people I thought about during the COVID-19 lockdowns because I remembered how much you like to write in bars. How has your writing process changed with the pandemic?
Well, I was the first person I knew to get COVID and I haven’t actually recovered completely. I have yet to finish a song four years later. In fact, is today March 11th?
It is.
Happy fourth anniversary of me getting COVID. I’ve been to a neurologist, I’ve had all sorts of tests. Apparently, my temporal lobe is out of sync with the rest of my brain, but that’s a very common and not-all-that-useful marker of something being wrong with your brain. But anyway, there’s something wrong with my brain where I am no longer able, currently, to finish a song.
Disability rights of Long COVID patients are routinely trampled upon by Michael Anders, Esther Galen / World Socialist Web Site
This mass disabling event is not a “natural disaster.” The ruling class has inflicted it on the population by prioritizing private profit over public health. Despite Biden’s campaign promise to “follow the science,” his administration has overseen the scrapping of the most limited mitigation measures used at the beginning of the pandemic. As far as the ruling class is concerned, the pandemic is “over,” in the sense that it will not allow COVID-19 to impinge on corporate profits.
An article by Dr. Karen Bonuck with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine entitled “Long COVID is a Mass Disabling Condition―Treat it Like One,” shows the complexity of treating Long COVID. She tells how her daughter was seeing specialists in “cardiology, neurology, gastroenterology, immunology, nutrition, otolaryngology, psychiatry, and sleep medicine” simply to manage her Long COVID. She poignantly describes the recovery process as proceeding in “‘inch-stones,’ not milestones.”
Long COVID is a debilitating illness even for those with access to high-quality medical care and insurance. For the working class, Long COVID can only be more disastrous. Workers who have been forced to stay on the job since the beginning of the pandemic are at great risk for developing Long COVID, which becomes more likely after each reinfection.
Despite these facts, the Social Security Administration and private insurers regularly deny benefits, often forcing people to wait months or even years for a final decision after appeal.
Woman, 30, Dies After Blood Clot Symptoms Were Dismissed Twice as 'Long COVID and Anxiety' by Vanessa Etienne / People
A U.K. actress died from a blood clot after her symptoms were dismissed as anxiety.
Just weeks after her 30th birthday, Emily Chesterton — who was from Manchester but moved to London to pursue acting — called her doctor’s office to make an appointment. She was complaining of pain in her calf, which had become hard.
During her first visit, she was given paracetamol, to treat mild pain. However, her symptoms got worse and Emily’s mother, Marion Chesterton, told the BBC, "She was breathless, light-headed and she had difficulty walking.”
Marion said Emily later went to a second appointment and a physician's assistant (PA) diagnosed her with “a calf sprain, long-Covid and anxiety." However, she said that her daughter's calf was never examined during the appointment.
It was later discovered that Emily’s pain was due to a blood clot in her left leg, which resulted in her dying of a pulmonary embolism — a serious condition in which one or more arteries has been blocked by a blood clot.
Long COVID Patients Say WorkSafeBC Is Making Life Worse by Brishti Basu / The Tyee
Both Graves and Goulding said they know long COVID patients considering applying for medical assistance in dying because they cannot afford to live without support.
Andrew said that when she discussed her long COVID symptoms with a WorkSafeBC vocational rehabilitation staffer in January, they were dismissed or linked with past illnesses and symptoms like fatigue from menopause or a sore throat several years ago.
WorkSafeBC said in its statement that it refers patients to doctors with specialized training when workers need medical evaluations, including a post-acute COVID clinic staffed by “specialists in internal medicine, respirology, and cardiology” to help with long COVID claims. Andrew saw an occupational therapist through WorkSafeBC but said she was not referred to any specialized doctors through the agency.
“I’m the one who’s had to advocate, reach out and educate myself about this new disease and figure out what’s happening,” Andrew said.
We ignored AIDS. Let’s not repeat the mistake on long COVID by Editorial / NJ.com
In the earliest days of the AIDS crisis, America ignored the problem, even though people were dropping dead by the thousands.
We’re repeating the mistake now with long COVID. Millions are suffering, but the government has largely turned its back, as new cases emerge with each passing wave.
So people are coming from all over the country this week to Washington D.C., in the footsteps of AIDS activists, to protest at the Lincoln Memorial on March 15th. They’re desperate for their stories to be heard. …
Others who are too sick to go are sending videos from darkened bedrooms to screen at the protest. Like Tania Powers, a foodie who loved restaurants and performing karaoke, but now spends most of her days in bed, with tinted glasses because she can barely even tolerate light.
“I’m one of the invisible people,” she says…. “This is not how I want to be seen, this is not how I want to be remembered. I was a very different person. I was articulate, and I loved life. And I’m trying not to cry, because my entire life has changed, and I’m not living. I’m just existing.”
Let’s hope that America hears her, and doesn’t repeat its shameful legacy of 1982.
More than a fifth of UK adults not looking for work by Michael Race / BBC
The UK fell into recession at the end of last year when the economy shrank for two consecutive three-month periods, but latest official statistics showed the level of unemployment remained steady. The figure also showed that wage rises slowed again, although pay is still outpacing inflation.
However, the number of people not employed or actively looking for work has remained at a persistently high level in recent years since it first surged during the pandemic.
Long-term illness has been cited as the main reason for about a third of the working-age inactive population not being in the labour force.
Impact of Covid on the UK's Economy and Health Service by Bob Hawkins / Seeing The Forest for the Trees
Since Covid the number of working age people in the UK that are economically inactive has increased and has not yet returned to pre-Covid levels. Amongst the G7 countries the UK had largest increase in economic inactivity due to Covid.
The rise in economic inactivity is mainly due to an increase in the number of people aged 50-64 years and the single largest reason they give for inactivity is poor health.
The number of people economically inactive due to long-term sickness is at a record high of 2.8 million in the UK.
“Excess Mortality" During COVID-19 Varied by Race, Ethnicity, Geography by Thomas B. Foster, Sonya R. Porter and Nikolas Pharris-Ciurej / US Census Bureau
In the decade leading up to the pandemic, the national mortality gap between the Black and White populations had narrowed substantially but still favored non-Hispanic White individuals.
The Hispanic population, however, held a long-standing mortality advantage over the non-Hispanic White population.
But the pandemic reversed improvements in the Black-White mortality gap and completely wiped out the Hispanic mortality advantage.
The Black-White and Hispanic-White mortality gaps shifted by an average of 2 deaths per 10,000 PMs in favor of the non-Hispanic White population in virtually all states during the pandemic’s entire first year (Figures 6 and 7).
These findings point to the social and economic determinants of health, which also contributed to racial and ethnic mortality gaps for years before the pandemic began and drove disproportionate increases in excess mortality among racial and ethnic minorities in the pandemic’s first year.
By 2022, COVID pandemic had shaved 1.6 years from global life expectancy, research reveals by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
In a stunning reversal of decades of progress, global life expectancy at birth fell 1.6 years from 2019 to 2021, with 16 million of 131 million total deaths in 2020 and 2021 directly or indirectly attributable to COVID-19, reveals one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind published yesterday in The Lancet.
Rage, waste and corruption: how Covid changed politics by David Runciman / The Guardian
When the pandemic hit, its effects on politics were intensely felt and hard to predict. In some ways, it seemed like the ultimate stress test. Different political systems – and leaders – were exposed in different ways. Those with longstanding vulnerabilities seemed destined to fail. At the same time, the advent of Covid appeared to open up the prospect of new kinds of political solidarity. We were in this together. Covid’s global impact was a reminder of what it is that we all have in common. An acute awareness of our shared vulnerability might create the conditions for a renewed sense of purpose in tackling global problems, including the climate emergency. Maybe a pandemic was just what we needed to remember what was at stake, and to remind some of us how lucky we are. …
The pandemic wormed its way into the weak spots in our political life, just as long Covid finds weaknesses in the human body. It no longer galvanises us, nor is it capable of destroying us. Instead, its symptoms are erratic and hard to fathom, appearing in surprising and seemingly unrelated places. Political long Covid is neither the great divider nor the great equaliser. It’s the great destabiliser.
Why wear a mask to a protest? by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
Every month or so, the twitter wars start up again. Someone, often a disabled person, pointedly expresses their frustration that - yet again- leftists are gathering with few masks in sight, without guidance to require masking, and/or without distribution of free masks. This lack of COVID mitigation makes these spaces dangerous for immunocompromised people, people living with Long COVID, and everyone who is at risk of serious post-COVID health problems including long-term disability (that’s everyone!)
The backlash to these statements is usually loud, angry, mean, and often quickly degenerates into hateful rhetoric about disabled people generally. I don’t think I’ve ever posted a masked selfie without MAGA trolls mocking me, instructing me to die, informing me I’m scared, telling me I’m crazy, and absolutely fuming that I should stay in my house. Disturbingly, some of the leftist backlash to repeated requests for masks and disability justice praxis sounds remarkable similar to the MAGA folks’ go-to talking points.
Many leftist groups and organizers are apparently ignorant that rhetoric around disabled people being “lazy”, “useless,” “weak” and “a burden,” has a long history of being deployed in service to the removal and even murder of disabled populations. The normalization of such rhetoric and the mainstreaming of the idea that certain people do not have a right to access public spaces, to health, or to life itself, is always a slippery slope that leads to the targeting, harming and killing of other vulnerable groups.
What Are We Even Doing: Bad Takes on the State of the Covid Pandemic
California health officials shorten COVID isolation period to 1 day
Dr. Bonnie Henry documentary to premiere at Victoria Film Festival | Vancouver Sun
Updated WHO COVID prevention guidance may endanger rather than protect, some experts say | CIDRAP
L’Oréal CEO says remote staff have ‘no passion, no creativity’
Preston Manning: Three lessons for the federal government from the COVID crisis
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My Foolish Heart by Tony Bennett and Bill Evans.
“Many leftist groups and organizers are apparently ignorant that rhetoric around disabled people being “lazy”, “useless,” “weak” and “a burden,” has a long history of being deployed in service to the removal and even murder of disabled . . .”
They know. They’re not ignorant they don’t care they want the work camps too because they miss brunch I guess.
Idk, a vote for either old white man is a vote for work camps.