Long Covid Is America's Forgotten Pandemic Problem

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Taylor Lorenz
@TaylorLorenz
Millions of Americans who suffer w/ Long Covid can’t move on with their lives because they’ve been left permanently disabled, w/ organ damage, or a myriad of other health issues. Lawmakers and the media continue to ignore and dismiss their plight

newrepublic.com
Long Covid Is America’s Forgotten Pandemic Problem
Millions of Americans who suffer long-term effects of the coronavirus can’t move on with their lives. Can lawmakers lend them a hand?
3:14 PM · Apr 22, 2022

https://newrepublic.com/article/166174/long-covid-legislation-kaine-pressley

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News that a federal judge had blocked the mask mandate on public transportation and airplanes this week was met with fanfare by many. But for others, such as immunocompromised Americans and parents with children too young to be vaccinated, there was little solace to be felt from the increasingly widespread sentiment that the burden of protecting oneself and others from the coronavirus is being increasingly shifted onto individuals.

For the vaccinated and boosted, the threat of the coronavirus is significantly diminished; however, there is still a possibility that their recovery could be hampered by continued protracted symptoms, known colloquially as “long Covid.” Many of the people who contracted the virus and developed long Covid at the beginning of the pandemic are still struggling with its effects years later. For these, the pandemic is far from over. Their brush with the virus has saddled them with medical conditions that could plague them for the rest of their lives. But beyond their health challenges, long Covid sufferers have also had to face the challenge of having their condition recognized by the medical community. Those tides have ever so slowly begun to turn, and now, legislation to address the needs of long Covid patients is taking shape in Washington.

Long Covid can involve a variety of symptoms in many combinations, including shortness of breath, persistent loss of smell and taste, tiredness or fatigue, and “post-exertional malaise”—symptoms that get worse after exercising or mental activities. Sometimes it is referred to as Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, or PASC, an acronym that some argue is more difficult to remember than “long Covid”—a term that was coined by patients, who do not assume that they are living “post”-virus. There is also significant overlap with long Covid and chronic symptoms like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), an illness that has historically been misunderstood and dismissed by medical experts. (As The Atlantic’s Ed Yong has noted, diagnoses of ME/CFS often follow disease outbreaks.)

We have more information about long Covid than we did at the beginning of the pandemic. But there are still many things we don’t know, among them the extent to which vaccines can be preventive—although recent studies do indicate that being fully vaccinated decreases the risk of later developing persistent symptoms of long Covid. Definitions of long Covid also vary, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization differing on how long a person must be sick to meet the criteria for the condition. Bryan Lau, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-lead of the Johns Hopkins Covid Long Study, said that the sweeping definitions of long Covid can make it difficult to count how many people are experiencing symptoms. “There’s a lot of heterogeneity among those that have long Covid. There are people that seem to be functioning okay, to people who seem to be not functioning at all,” Lau told The New Republic.

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