Welcome to the club if second class citizenship. Love, someone who had an autoimmune disorder before COVID. Between 5 and 8% of people have one, and there was never any urgency before.
When people are considered resources, the ones that don't provide enough return on investment are eliminated. The only investment that is made is therefore in the types of medical issues that are acute / short-term, treatable and cheap to treat.
Long covid is not one of those conditions, at least not yet.
It's easy to treat people with long covid as resources, because you won't see them out and about. They're housebound from either their existing symptoms or the knowledge that they're at risk of reinfection.
This is not a new thing, it has always happened to people with disabilities. It's just that we have a sudden large new cohort amongst the ranks, often from previously medically-privileged groups, who have to discover the awful truth firsthand now.
This will happen to many more people unless we change how we provide for society.
Im convinced this virus has effected peoples brains the shift in people who are just...just.. morons has notably increased both on the highways and in person since covid, mental illness lately?
Jesus these comments act like curing diseases is just a matter of attention and throwing money at it. Cancer still exists because it turns out science is actually really complicated. While we’ve made breakthroughs, they come at huge amounts of time and money (see KRAS G12D inhibitor).
Take fibrosis in the lungs post-COVID. That’s scar tissue. Your body magically stitched you up. The cells that were previously there for air exchange died, and are not coming back. Lungs don’t continually grow at adulthood. If they did, it would be prone to cancer, which is also going to be a huge risk if a treatment ever gets far enough to undo tissue fibrosis and stimulate proliferation of the existing cells in the lung. Not to mention they need instruction to form the alveolar structures (no way how they’re going to do that, they formed by budding in embryogenesis).
People think scientists are taking their sweet time on it, but don’t even have the patience to understand the problem in the first place.
My cousin was doing research into chronic fatigue syndrome (which shares a lot with some versions of long covid, and still isn't 'solved') back in the 1990's. It's going to take time.
Edit: "Today, the National Institutes of Health launched and is opening enrollment for phase 2 clinical trials that will evaluate at least four potential treatments for long COVID, with additional clinical trials to test at least seven more treatments expected in the coming months. Treatments will include drugs, biologics, medical devices and other therapies. The trials are designed to evaluate multiple treatments simultaneously to identify more swiftly those that are effective." - source
Ableism and people who are subject to it pointing it out has nothing to do with anything you've written, it is a systemic issue that spans across not only every medical field but society as a whole.
Perhaps if you took the time to listen to disabled people and our issues (by seeking out the information yourself, not demanding we do the work for you and then brushing it off with a bunch of excuses) instead of talking over us, you might actually gain an understanding of what we face and help, or at least shut up and be neutral, instead of just adding to the pile of shit we have to deal with (hint: talking over disabled people about issues you clearly don't understand is ableism).
And the vaccine development? We’ve made vaccines for decades. Urgency was taking what we know how to do and increasing the production time on it. Curing post-COVID or lung fibrosis? Not going to be a matter of scaling up production.
I feel sad welcoming you, but this is the world of ableism.
Get comfy, it isn't going anywhere (especially not as long as capitalism is around, as fiat_lux alludes to).
Fuck off. A lot of people got sick because others were idiots, not because they behaved wrong. Masks are most effective when the sick person wears them, which you can't influence, way too many idiots got out even thought they felt sick and not every place in the world encouraged the use of the really effective FFP2/KN95 Masks. A lot of long-covid sufferers also got sick early on, before we even learned what they best measures would be to protect ourselves and others and before we had the vaccines that reduce the risk of suffering from it.
I don't disagree with your points, mostly, but I will put good money down on the fact that the sweeping majority of people who have had covid got it because they were full on anti-mask, or because they went to densely populated areas.
I guarantee you that those screaming the loudest about long term covid assistance are the anti-mask boomers who screamed the loudest about being made to wear a mask.
If you are going to completely sidestep my obvious point and engineer your own meaning for what I said, eat a dick.
The problem with your train of thought is, that a lot of these densely populated areas are called things like school, work, super market, public transport or hospitals. Plus, access to masks and even information was never entirely fairly distributed.
When I went shopping, I often had people come close up to me, sometimes without masks, even when I told them to please keep distancing. Even when masks were mandatory lots of people let their noses poke out or just wore extremely badly fitted masks.
It's nice to hear that you evaded the virus, at least you didn't get noticeably sick, but you shouldn't treat that as something easy that everyone can do. In my opinion you just got lucky that no one drilled a hole in your defences. And possibly in a lucky position to even enable that, as said, a lot of common infection areas aren't easy to avoid for many.
I hope that you are able to escape having something debilitating being deemed unimportant. I suspect you might underestimate the impacts on 65+ million people and their families, who often act as unpaid caregivers.
The intersection of disability with poverty and class warfare is a huge part of that. The majority of people with severe disability do not have incomes. People with less severe disabilities are still much more likely to have lower or no income. Disability is a class warfare issue.
And if, making a huge assumption here, you're invested in reducing poverty and global inequity... then dismissing the systemic issues underpinning the experiences of huge groups of people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder works against those goals.
Even with the nebulous definitions, the significant economic impact of long COVID is clear. In July 2022 update of earlier figures, David Cutler of Harvard University estimates that the total economic cost of long COVID is $3.7 trillion. That’s $11,000 per capita or 17% of the 2019 gross domestic product (GDP).
Cutler subdivides these costs into three components:
Quality of life (QALY), which comprises 59% of the overall cost, or $2.195 trillion Lost earnings of $997 billion Medical care spending: $528 billion
The Brookings report warns that Cutler’s estimate may actually be incomplete in that it does not include the economic impact of lower productivity (i.e., due to caretaking for others or working while ill).
Because I agree with the idea in your post that better things are still possible, and I don’t want you to give up on caring about this one thing and those 65 million people.
Please do not parrot the ableism of austerity-brained politicians. Being able-bodied can be extremely temporary, and America treats disabled folks horribly. Support them.
Disabilities without visible symptoms of all types are routinely ignored by most people. People with chronic pain, pulmonary issues, even mental illness don’t really get the same sympathy and understanding as someone in a wheelchair. I think it’s because if it’s not right in your face reminding you, it’s easy to forget what someone else is feeling.
It's definitely easier to forget invisible disabilities, but visible disabilities have some huge downsides too. It's not always sympathy or empathy that others respond with. Especially if they think you're going to cost them time, effort and/or money.
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