Thread by @SalvMattera

I'm at the point now where it's been well over 6 months since I've felt 95% recovered from Long COVID. But now I realize there's another aspect to this illness: The fear of reinfection. I understood intellectually that reinfections are dangerous, but

It doesn't really sink in fully until you're feeling like your old self for a while and realize on a very gut level that this isn't over and won't be over anytime in the foreseeable future.

When you're very sick, you only wish you could feel better. But then you feel better, and you realize your life just can't go back to the way it once was. You know too much.

Of course, there are many folks with Long COVID who suppress this, turn to denial, and go back to playing normal. Maybe that'll work for them - who knows? - but the data is clear: the odds are not in their favor.

So you recover and still your life isn't the same. If you're honest about your experience, you know it can't be. Even if you found the drug or the solution or whatever that you think was the key to your recovery (and who even knows if that's true, maybe it was just luck)

You might get reinfected and develop some other version of Long COIVD that doesn't respond to your tricks. What then?

Long COVID cannot be separated from the ongoing pandemic. Even if we find a few drugs that make people feel less tired (and in fact we already have some - LDN, etc.) this doesn't end until the pandemic ends. And if the pandemic never ends, this will continue to be an issue.

At this point, I think I've long blocked all the people who would jump in with "but we'll never make everyone mask!" - there are other possibilities: sterilizing vaccine, air quality, prophylactics etc

This is why I have criticized the ME researchers and the like who go around to conferences and don't mask. They simply do not get it. They are selling people nonsense. They are part of the problem.

Also I'll admit I have a big bias here that I've had from the beginning and I can't apologize for it: I have kids, and I think about their own health more than my own. I'd happily live the rest of my life feeling horrible if it meant they didn't have to.

If the pandemic keeps going, the possibility that one or both of them eventually gets sick hangs heavy in my mind. I think a lot of Long COVID folks that I've seen recover and run back to the bar and pretend nothing happened are younger and childless

Maybe if that was me, I'd do the same? But I can't. I have to keep going here

Being a parent doesn't give me any special powers here tho. To be honest, I've met some parents with Long COVID who I think are so deeply terribly afraid of their kids getting Long COVID that it just doesn't enter their mind at all.

Knew a parent with Long COVID whose kids had strange health issues that fit into a LC bucket but they wouldn't even acknowledge it. They saw it with themselves, but when it came to their kids, shifted to what we see in the broader culture of "these health issues are a mystery"