Along with claiming the lives of 1.2 million Americans, the covid-19 pandemic has been described as a mass disabling event.
Estimates of prevalence range considerably, depending on how researchers define long covid in a given study, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts it at 17 million adults.
Despite long covid’s vast reach, the federal government’s investment in researching the disease — to the tune of $1.15 billion as of December — has so far failed to bring any new treatments to market.
I have enormous sympathy for those long COVID sufferers that avoided large gatherings in the beginning, wore masks when they had to go out, got vaccines and boosters when they became available, and despite doing everything experts were advising, still managed to draw the short straw. My heart goes out to them.
The ones that acted like all of the basic precautionary measures were at best inconvenient, or worse, an infringement on their god given right to spread disease… not so much.
I mean I was 4x vaccinated before I got it. But it’s getting a little hurtful that every single post I make about long COVID has half the comments making fun of people for not getting vaccinated.
Like for fucks sake just take seriously the thing that ruined our lives and stop victim blaming at every corner you can.
Most people got long COVID before the vaccines were even a thing, it’s got the highest rate among nurses, those who were working overtime during the pandemic keeping your relatives alive.
Which is exactly why I go to great pains to point out that I have great sympathy for those that did everything right, and still got screwed over.
But remember that nobody just catches COVID (or the flu, or similar diseases) in a vacuum. They got it from someone else, who got it from someone else, who got it from someone else. There’s a strong probability that someone in your infection ancestry (for lack of a better term) is one of those selfish people that refused to take basic precautions, and if they had taken precautions, you would never have gotten long COVID. We’ll never know who it is, but at least one person out there is probably directly to blame for your long COVID. That person deserves to be mercilessly ridiculed until long after they die.
Thank you, on the day I was going to get my second booster I became violently ill from Covid, I was bed ridden with a very high fever for nearly 2 weeks (which wasn’t easy, living alone), and ever since then (november 2022) I have limited energy.
With some careful planning I managed to work full time again, but don’t expect too much extra from me.