I got the plague mid-March this year. It was bad enough that the Covid nurse practitioners thought I should get a round of monoclonal antibodies, so I spent three hours in an uncomfortable chair in a disused hospital hallway with one of the nurses and her trainees.
The treatment helped and I felt pleasantly fussed over even if the situation made fully appreciating it difficult. I was out of it for about a week and then the respiratory symptoms, fever and headaches went away.
What didn’t go away, and what I’m still getting physical therapy for, are the inflamed joints and tendons that accompanied the other symptoms. Both my doc and the physical therapist told me that my experience was pretty common, especially in my age bracket (old). The physical therapist described it as “full-body tendinitis.”
I mention this because governments at every level from local on up are taking an approach to the disease that amounts to “let’s you and Covid fight.” The CDC adopted relaxed policies last December that were and are seen by many scientists as politically and economically motivated rather than medically or scientifically, and that send a lot of people back to work spreading the virus.
Meanwhile, the feds have given up on pushing boosters, resulting in a booster rate half that of the OECD member state average. (One third for us, two thirds for them. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is a wonderful source for all sorts of comparative statistics.)
The end result of this approach is a virus happily mutating forever, a fair number of dead people and an undetermined number of people suffering from what appears to be a cluster of syndromes going under the umbrella of long Covid, many with long-term symptoms far more unpleasant than mine.
Writing in The Guardian, Eric Topol, a molecular medicine professor and director of a Scripps research institute, says that contrary to the CDC and the “live with it” Covid enthusiasts now abounding in the op-ed landscape, fully containing the virus is doable and should be done.
David Adam wrote in the journal Nature about the skepticism among scientists and researchers toward the relaxed CDC guidelines.
Also in Nature, Liam Drew wrote on the question of whether vaccine mandates work. This is a long and somewhat technical article, and the tl;dr version is yeah, they work, they save lives, but the social impacts are difficult to quantify.
Jennifer Abbasi wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Society (JAMA) about a new sort of plan (sort of) for the federal government to investigate Long Covid, and the mixed reaction to it. The article places the percentage of people who develop the syndrome after a Covid infection at somewhere between five and 30. That’s a lot of people even at the low end.
Steven Thrasher, whose book The Viral Underclass (reviewed in the journal Science here) was just published, wrote back in January in The Guardian about the Biden administration’s borderline slapstick approach to getting people tested and inoculated and otherwise protected early this year. In February, he wrote in Scientific American about the press campaign to normalize both the disease and the death toll from it.
Leana Fucking Wen, perhaps the nation’s premier Covid enthusiast, wrote in the Washington Post about how Biden’s encounter with the disease constituted a teaching moment for the nation. The lesson? If you don’t have a job with 30 paid sick days per month, and a doctor standing by, and a domestic staff to see to your daily needs, that’s on you. (I can’t tell you how happy I am to 86 that tab.)
Finally, Lawrence Lessig described the U.S. as a “failed democratic state” in the New York Review of Books. I confess: I’m leaving this tab open. It doesn’t touch on Covid directly, but it does help explain why we’re at where we’re at on the disease.
Please let me know if you have suggestions for additional Covid articles worth reading.
(Contributors to this post include Alice Coltrane’s Transcendence; Chico Hamilton’s It’s About Time; and The Clash’s Sandanista.)