Lingering Illness After COVID-19

Perhaps later I will look at this at more length, when more data is available. But I’ve noticed emerging reports that some people who survive COVID-19, perhaps as many as 5%, suffer ongoing illness and occasional flare-ups. Nobody knows yet how long this lasts. At least one support group for such patients has divided itself into 30 day, 60 day and 90 day categories.

In other words, nobody knows whether they will ever be truly well again. What they describe as their daily struggle closely resembles the plight of patients with such diseases as multiple sclerosis or chronic fatigue syndrome / M.E (myalgic encephalomyelitis). The symptoms differ somewhat but the impact is very similar.

This is important on many levels. For some individuals, surviving this coronavirus doesn’t allow them to resume whatever they did before. They are partially disabled. They don’t know whether it is temporary or permanent. If it is temporary, they don’t know how long it will continue.

Their employers may reopen the workplace, but these people cannot take up their jobs at their previous level of effort. Some may be able to work part time.

They will need whatever disability support income their country (or their private insurance) provides. Some of them may need home health care assistance.

The world doesn’t notice when a person here or a person there goes through this because they’re ill with MS or ME/CFS or systemic lupus. But the pandemic appears to be throwing a wave of people from the active workforce into sudden and lasting impairment.

The pandemic won’t be over when it’s over. Like polio, it will leave us with friends, family and colleagues who can’t do quite what they did before.

As with the post-polio years, we’d better figure out how to help them live the best lives they can in whatever condition they are in. It’s both the compassionate thing to do and the wise thing to do.

And maybe, while we’re at it, we should also help all those other people I mentioned live the best lives they can.

At the societal level, people with certain types of illnesses such as the examples I gave are often shoved out of sight and expected to survive on minimal scraps. Discarding people because they are not close enough to perfect is cruel at the personal level and wasteful at the societal level. Somewhere among our physically impaired is the next Stephen Hawking. And somewhere among them is someone we love.

So… how are we going to treat them?