Those of us who could work at home sat on our couches, scrolling through the horrors, watching television, getting cocktails to go, and disinfecting groceries. These were the placid yet unsettling days that walling yourself off from the world brings—fear, uncertainty, and isolation. For many, this was the central trauma of this period. But for myself and hundreds of millions of others globally, the trauma wasn’t only about these beginnings, it’s about the horrors we still experience today.
It was a scary sensation, sometimes more specifically referred to as “air hunger,” which feels more accurate. Your breaths are shallow and incomplete. But aside from a few days spent counting down the minutes before I was allowed another puff of albuterol (every four to six hours), my symptoms were mild. I never ran a fever. Within two weeks, I thought I was better.
Then something strange happened: My toes started changing color. Every night, they’d become red, hot, and ungodly itchy. During the day, they’d be purple, as if they belonged to a corpse. Scheduling an appointment with a dermatologist for an unrelated foot problem in the middle of a pandemic felt ridiculous—hundreds of people were dying every day in New York at that point. But whatever this was—a rash? Gangrene? Creeping death?—got worse, causing many sleepless nights in which I would spray my burning feet with ice-cold water at 3 a.m.
From June 2020 until vaccines became available to the general public in April 2021, my “fire feet” persisted. I tried different medications, ointments, and supplements. I could only walk a few blocks each day. During the George Floyd protests in summer 2020, I relied on Citibike. Yet by that winter, I would no longer be able to ride a bike, and today, I still can’t.
Fall 2021 brought some relief, as I started to learn what combinations of medications and supplements helped me function better. I never imagined I’d come to rely on 15 to 20 medications per day just to feel somewhat normal. I still have to ration my steps. I still feel physically ill the day after I do too much, walk uphill, exercise, or dance at a wedding. And now, I am still plagued with the fear of an ongoing pandemic while many have the luxury of pretending it’s over.
This goes far beyond my personal health relative to others. This is a story about public policy and the nature of citizenship, as well. This is about the health of a nation, and the world, and the lessons we could have learned. Five years later, it is sad to think about what could have been. For a moment, we had universal basic income and health care. For a moment, we banged pots and pans each night to thank our health care workers. For a moment, there was a sense that we cared about the vulnerable. There was a moment of solidarity, somewhere within the trauma.
Any lesson we seemed to learn early on was seemingly unlearned. Now, five years later, we are back with Trump, who is cutting off National Institutes of Health research into long Covid as randomized-control trials finally get off the ground, and threatening Medicaid cuts when, for a moment in 2020, the fantasy of universal health care coverage felt possible. And it was Biden who oversaw the largest disenrollment from Medicaid in 2023, after ending the public health emergency and the temporary Medicaid expansion that came with it.
The public still remains at risk, though they’d prefer not to hear about it. As Miles Griffis recently wrote for The Sick Times, an outlet he co-founded in response to the long-Covid crisis, “The pandemic—and the world’s failure to respond to it adequately—has led to an unsafe society for disabled and immunocompromised people. Many experience deep grief: the loss of friendships, family relationships, marriages, and bodily safety in a hostile society that ignores the ongoing pandemic.”
It’s a strange, pervasive amnesia. Publications erroneously refer to “immunity debt,” while looking past the fact that we’re all getting Covid over and over, damaging our immune systems, and it’s being treated as an innocuous fact of life. Those of us who want to take any extra steps to protect ourselves have been largely abandoned. Wearing masks in crowded spaces is rare, mocked, and in some cases even banned. Any kinds of commonsense precaution like air filtration have been shoved on the back burner or worse. The vulnerable are on their own—and there’s little reason to believe that our ranks won’t grow.
The Trump administration has also blocked access to CDC data—and if we don’t know rates of Covid or other illnesses, then we can’t do anything about it. Public health is in dire straits, as anti-vaccine rhetoric gets more authority with RFK Jr. at the helm of HHS. Preventable diseases that were eradicated years ago like measles are, as they say, so back, baby.
There is no justice without health justice for everyone. A quarter of the population, and growing, are disabled. And it bears repeating, as Tom Scocca wrote in 2023, that “the able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people, but the same people at different times.” In acquiescing to this status quo, we leave ourselves and our loved ones vulnerable to its consequences.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The Pandemic Never Ended )
Also on site :