What if you knew that the overwhelming majority of these sufferers never had a positive antigen test to indicate present COVID infection or an antibody test to show past infection? What if you knew that just as hospitals were paid bonuses to declare cases as COVID rather than any number of other potential causes of death, the U.S. government is paying a bounty to researchers to pontificate on “Long COVID”?
And what if you knew the demographic profile for sufferers of acute COVID is vastly different from that of so-called “long-haulers”? Acute COVID (normally lasting about one to four weeks) is essentially a disease of the elderly and hits males and blacks harder than females and whites. “Long COVID” is overwhelmingly a disease of white middle-aged females.
What if you also knew that those “Long COVID” demographics, even according to those who insist this is definitely COVID-related, happen to match those of previous somatoform diseases (even if it’s become not just un-PC but a career-killer to say so) such as “multiple chemical sensitivity” and “fibromyalgia encephalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome” and that indeed even these syndromes appear to have been identified well over a century ago?
Finally, what if you knew that far from doing sufferers a favor by misclassifying their symptoms we’re actually dooming them to perhaps a lifetime of suffering because just as there’s no cure to the above somatoform diseases there will never be a cure to “Long COVID,” leaving these people forever in despair sometimes, as with Dawson’s Creek writer Heidi Ferrer who took her own life in May after what her husband called “an unremitting battle with long-haul COVID-19.” She was 50 years old.