Post #3736864

2026-07-10 03:24 UTC

That's what the earlier technical names for Long Covid, PASC (Post-Acute Sequelae of Covid infection) and PACS (Post-Acute Covid Syndrome), were in reference to. It's not a singular disease with a definitive biomarker. There's no diagnostic test with a binary result. It's the term we use for how increasingly predisposed to subsequent disorder and illness each serial covid infection leaves every organ in the body. Evident, for instance, in U.S. Labor Bureau statistics, which show over-16 disability climbing at over twice the rate, in the past six years, as it had during the prior twelve. For a baseline context, see also research around younger generations (as in Gen X and later) suffering higher incidence of a wide variety of health conditions at earlier ages, with trends predating our current pandemic. Conditions compound, making us progressively more vulnerable. 4/6 #LongCovid #CovidIsNotOver #PublicHealth

Replies (2)

@beadsland@beige.party 2026-07-10 03:26

"This is a kind of thing that just happens" is pure unexamined cope. This being a sentiment that Rachel Carson penned a notorious polemic against. (See K. Walker's retrospective on same.) It's how such patterns are taken as normal in the same way that younger generations have no conception of what it was like to have swarms of flying insects literally everywhere, dead bugs smeared all over car windshields, because they've grown up in a time when that was no longer a thing. We're all aging into an era where more anecdotal sickness "just happens" to more people, more often and sooner than would have been expected in the eras that came before. We may not have a Laplace daemon's etiology for every known disease, but most certainly ought know, in now the seventh year of an ongoing pandemic, that nothing "just happens" in isolation from preceding conditions. That's not, as the kids say, how any of this works. "I think it is just bad luck." This is cope. 5/6 #LongCovid #Anthropocene #PublicHealth

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@Robotistry@fediscience.org 2026-07-10 13:36

@beadsland@beige.party I remember the trolls and sea lions in 2021 and 2022 saying, "Well if Long Covid is so prevalent, why aren't we seeing this big shift in the disability data? Shouldn't that be a thing?" and being told it was too early to see the trend in the data. Sigh. And grrr.

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