On 26 December last, ABC News Australia published a long article on the personal effects of Long Covid. It basically consists of a series of testimonies, some of them about the same effect in ME, as the social effects due to ignorance and stigmatisation are strikingly similar to those in ME, though of course with a much longer history in this. Below are the observations of David Putrino of Mount Sinai, New York. He writes:
Long COVID is not just destroying people’s health. Behind closed doors, in homes across Australia and abroad, it is irreversibly changing relationships — sometimes for the better, too often for worse.
Every day patients, partners, parents and children are grieving marriages, friendships and familial bonds that have fractured under the strain of this illness, often because it is so poorly understood, including by medical professionals. And experts are increasingly concerned about the long-term consequences for the broader society of all this pain and destruction, particularly if governments continue letting COVID rip.
“Every day we hear the story of how long COVID is affecting the way people can connect with others,” says David Putrino, who runs a long COVID clinic as director of rehabilitation for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. “This is a known phenomenon in chronic illness and disability [communities]: that when you first become disabled or experience a chronic illness, your world changes — it becomes smaller. And suddenly, friends and family members who can’t easily interact with you stop interacting with you.”
Until 2020, Dr Putrino worked mostly with people who had suffered stroke and traumatic brain injury — typically sudden events that result in disability and big shifts in the dynamics of patients’ relationships. Now, he sees those same changes rippling through the families who visit his long COVID clinic.
The partners of some patients, he says, will acknowledge the difficulty of their situation but “lean in and say, ‘I’m committed to you; our relationship hasn’t changed, just your circumstances have’.” Others, though, “have gone in the other direction, and said, ‘Well, I never really signed up for this, this is the end of the relationship’. And unfortunately, the negative reaction is much more common.”
Putrino hears various iterations of the “it’s all in your head” story in his clinic all the time
David Putrino hears various iterations of the “it’s all in your head” story in his clinic all the time. It’s an offensive refrain he says is fuelled largely by “fringe” practitioners and researchers who ignore the thousands of studies in reputable journals documenting the pathology of long COVID.
He also hears accounts from couples who are struggling with the adjustments they’ve had to make to their home, work and social lives. For instance, some people feel the strain of having to take on extra chores that their unwell partner can no longer manage; others suddenly feel like a single parent, which can breed resentment.
Then there’s the risk of reinfection. “We know folks with long COVID are more susceptible to reinfection as a result of how long COVID can affect the immune system, and often they will become much more COVID cautious than their spouses,” Dr Putrino says. “And so now there’s an added layer of difficulty and resentment in the relationship where one spouse is wanting to embrace the fact that COVID has been declared “over” by governments … and one partner simply cannot do that … and suddenly there is this incongruent way that people are living their lives, which makes it very hard to … maintain a relationship.”
Dr Putrino sees long COVID as a problem of loneliness, the physical health consequences of which have been compared to smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day. “We know that social connection tends to get under your skin and affect every aspect of physical, mental and emotional health,” he says.
And yet, he’s constantly hearing from people who claim to not know anyone with long COVID, or who dismiss it as “someone else’s problem”. “The reality is, you probably know someone with long COVID,” he says. “But the only sign of that is that you’re not seeing them anymore.”
For David Putrino, the “one thing” he wishes people would understand sooner rather than later is the “looming social impact” of long COVID. “I’m talking about the workforce being diminished, the fact that people can’t think the way they used to think — we’re losing intellectual capital, we’re losing physical capital, we’re losing social capital,” he says.
“And I wish people would understand the urgency of solving this, because what I’m seeing various countries doing in terms of their response to long COVID is they’re throwing a token amount of money towards research and saying, ‘Well, that will solve it’, patting themselves on the back without understanding that this is just as large an existential threat as climate change.”
And if we can’t find a way to curb the spread of the virus and halt the increase in cases of long COVID, he says, those effects will bite sooner than we think.
“I don’t know how to be more clear about how much of an existential threat this is, but it doesn’t seem to be getting through — we still seem to be in this denial phase of ‘othering’ the illness,” Dr Putrino says. “There’s this shared fantasy that long COVID is someone else’s problem, and I just think we need people to understand that it’s everyone’s problem.”
Taken from: Long COVID will take your health, your wealth — then it will come for your marriage, ABC Australia
The ME Global Chronicle 