Recent articles in The Atlantic and The New Yorker cover the emerging lines of debate, which pit patient advocates urgently seeking treatment against scientists following cautious research protocols. This created a sense of immediacy and urgency absent from other chronic-illness debates and a constituency for research and treatment among a population - doctors, especially - that’s often skeptical of difficult patients and mystery illnesses.īut already with long Covid you can see the usual structure of chronic-illness controversies reasserting itself.
But unlike other such conditions, which tend to creep up on society, long-haul Covid arrived suddenly, creating a large pool of sufferers in a short period of time and afflicting frontline medical workers and younger patients in large numbers.
The long-term form of Covid-19 has something in common with other forms of chronic illness - strange and varied symptoms, lasting debilitation, no certain treatment.
