https://www.switchyardmag.com/issue-2/thelonghaul
From the beginning, one thing was clear: the majority, around 80 percent, of long-haulers are women (and people assigned female at birth), often in our 30s, 40s, and 50s. In the United States, an outsized portion are women of color—but it would take nearly three years for the federal government to start to minimally acknowledge this fact. (Stats on race and long Covid are still estimations, but the Census Bureau has found Latinx, African American, and Indigenous people are most likely to develop long Covid.) Early in the pandemic, women of color were denied care during acute Covid infections, with hospitals calling security or the police on them in emergency rooms. As long Covid set in, they were disbelieved or ignored.
The official story has been that long Covid is a new, mysterious, and therefore still incomprehensible illness—all of which is simply untrue. More than a century of medical science has told this same story, of the unlucky few who never recovered from viral or other infectious illnesses. It happened after the 1918 flu and after polio. It happened following Ebola, West Nile virus, and SARS in 2003. The narrative has always been that some sufferers are too weak, or simply too weak-willed, to return to their former lives. The truth is much more complicated.
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The local beach was less than a mile away, but my wheelchair cannot handle sand. I walked from the parking lot to the water but felt winded and lightheaded. I couldn’t stand in the surf and didn’t dare try to swim. On the hottest days, I sat on large boulders watching the waves roll in, dipping my feet in to keep cool. I had longed to be near the ocean, but the struggle just to get to the water’s edge left me alternating between sorrow and fury.
Later, I would remember 2022 as the summer when people stopped caring. The Washington Post interviewed Americans taking flights while knowingly Covid positive, and CDC research later showed that 81 percent of airplane bathroom wastewater samples had Omicron RNA. Friends who were very careful about Covid in 2020 and 2021 now posted photos on social media of themselves traveling or crowded inside public spaces. Unmasked. As if they couldn’t be reinfected, couldn’t get long Covid. Did it only ever matter to protect themselves?