It’s time for our society to admit that we’ve made a mistake and change course. The COVID-is-mild experiment, despite the wishing and the hoping, has been a tragic failure. We aren’t just accepting ongoing hospitalizations and deaths to protect the economy, but also ignoring the social and economic costs of continuing high levels of acute infections. Worse still are more cases of Long COVID, a condition that takes many people entirely out of the workforce. And with every wave, the staffing attrition worsens.
We’re all tired. Even if we’re not sick, we’re covering for sick co-workers, staying home and caring for sick family members and worrying about what’s next. But pandemics are hard and being tired doesn’t change that.
Unlike previous pandemics, though, we have tools for control. We can test and vaccinate; we can reduce transmission by wearing respirator-style masks and improving indoor air quality; and we have better treatments. But our leaders surrendered to the virus.
And to make giving up look reasonable, they avoided certain uncomfortable facts. The silence over Long COVID is particularly deafening. We already saw something similar in the 2002-04 SARS-CoV-1 pandemic. Nearly 30 per cent of health-care workers in a 2010 study who had survived SARS “had not returned to work two years after illness onset.”
So it’s no surprise that in our current pandemic we are also seeing long-term illness. Some have challenging but not debilitating effects, such as a chronic cough, or loss of taste and smell. For others, the effects are debilitating, including crushing fatigue or “brain fog” that affects their daily lives — even their ability to return to jobs or school. Long COVID is a significant risk for all age groups, and it’s clear that it’s significantly harming younger working-age adults.
Image description: Electron microscope image of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles. Photo by: NIAID. Image is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 DEED | Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
