The mobilization against COVID-19 was impressive. A similar investment is needed to understand and treat the chronic resulting illness.
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.
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.
There is no urgency.
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.
The urgency was when we shut everything down, wore masks, and cranked out a vaccine which a bunch of dumbasses won’t take.
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?
Nah, morons just get too comfortable to openly be morons. A trend that’s going on for quite a while.
That investment is needed way more for other things, just like the 3693648 neglected things we need to have more focus on.
Mass disability is fucking expensive, actually.. You can care about fiscal responsibility without throwing inconvenient human beings under the bus.
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).
Why are you telling me this
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.
You know, I still mask up and I still social distance where possible and I haven’t gotten covid.
Maybe you should have just worn the damn mask, Karen.
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.
