Just read that @newrepublic #longcovid article, & want to make one basic rebuttal, a point I try to make clearly in The Invisible Kingdom:

When patients critique the reflexive psychologization of unexplained symptoms, they' re not saying that psychiatric illness is not valid./1 Rather, they (we) are critiquing the fact that people who live in bodies at the edge of medical knowledge are almost always told our problems are psychiatric, when further research and inquiry might lead to biomedical explanations.2/

The big study on the impact of COVID reinfections on health (seen in preprint in June) is now out. It finds that compared to those w/o reinfections, people w/reinfections are more likely to have a variety of negative outcomes, including cardiovascular, even if vaccinated.🧵 /1 There have been some misreadings of this study in the media, but what the study actually suggests—that being reinfected is not necessarily mild/benign, at least for older people—is significant enough that it ought to galvanize further study of reinfections, in different cohorts/2

Just read the @NYMag piece about #longcovid and I've got a lot of critiques of it - as a journalist, as an editor, &, of course, as a person living with complex chronic illness. Briefly, here are some of the issues I see, ones I think turn up in a lot of magazine pieces:🧵 First, the piece conflates patients with #longCOVID and #POTS who might be helped by exercise rehab (done right--itself hard to find) with those who will be harmed by exercise. There are different groups. Important to make fine distinctions as a science writer.

At an event I did last night, someone asked me to recommend poems of illness, and my mind totally blanked. But of course names popped in my head all day today. A little 🧵 of illness poems I love:
(thinking of #Lyme #MECFS, #longcovid #dysautonomia, #autoimmunedisease, and more) An incredible poem about headaches by Emily Dickinson that I bet some #longcovid and #migraine sufferers could connect to. I mean, these lines:

"And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -"

poetryfoundation.org/poems/45706/i-…

So, it's becoming increasingly clear to me (11 weeks out from infection) that I may have some form of #longCOVID, and I've decided to be public about it now.

One of my main symptoms is the form of brain fog that @edyong vividly describes in his must-read piece. How so? 🧵

https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1569302974811308032

Mostly it's a day-to-day executive function challenges; interestingly, *quite unlike* the "brain fog" I had before, when I appear to have had untreated Lyme disease or Bartonella. (Based on a CDC positive test for the latter).

That manifested as a flu-like fogginess.

But... /2

It gets to me when public organizations frame flawed and convenient group-think as unimpeachable logic. The genuinely pragmatic, intellectual position on COVID right now is not being represented by the CDC guidelines or /1 by these quotes in @nytimes:

“We know that Covid-19 is here to stay,”

"This is a welcome change...it actually shows how far we’ve come.”

Well, yes, let's look at how far we have come in the pandemic... /2

Having COVID as someone who spent a decade + sick with an infection and then infection-associated illness, I have a few totally impressionistic thoughts about my virus experience... (mini 🧵) So you have some sense of my health history: I have POTS, EDS, suspected MCAS, small fiber neuropathy, autoimmune thyroiditis, and post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome/some kind of tick-borne illness. I was really sick from 2011-14, after which I got *much* better. /2

Let's be really clear about what is happening at this stage in the pandemic: We are giving up on public health and embracing the privatization of health in ways that serve the able and young & write off anyone vulnerable. 1/ I recommend listening to @gregggonsalves on @BrianLehrer today for his edifying reminder that the now normative view that each of us should assess "personal risk" is in fact a very radical version of "public health": wnyc.org/story/pandemic… 2/

The blanket assertions about #longCOVID in the recent @Nytimes newsletter quoted below are dangerously reductive. We are at a place in #longCOVID and pandemic discourse where a lot in the media minimize the reality of long COVID. Why is that? /1

https://twitter.com/loscharlos/status/1504895220252520448

It's partly because of most journalists' lack of experience with/understanding of the state of the science of infection-associated illnesses such as #MECFS and more. I just spent 10 years reporting on them and I still am overwhelmed. But... /2

1/ Yesterday, I published a piece in @TheAtlantic about the crisis of #longCOVID and the doctors at Mount Sinai who are urgently trying to help patients living with it: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… 2/ The causes of #longCOVID are manifold—and there is a lot we don't know. But what is clear is that we’re facing a major crisis: Informal estimates suggest that 10 to 30 percent of those infected with the novel coronavirus have long-term symptoms.