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.
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.