With the threat of monkey pox out there.
It's may be easy to forget that we're not out of this Covid pandemic.
And I don't just mean new cases of Covid.
Long Covid remains and there's more and
more evidence that it's affecting a lot of people.
There's some recent CDC data showing that nearly one in five
people who have been infected with COVID-19 have some four of long Covid.
That means literally tens of millions of working age adults right now.
And the symptoms can be non existent for long Covid, they can be mild,
they can be very serious, including possibly death.
You can look at this list fatigue that interferes with daily activities.
And honestly, I want to stop there for one second because fatigue doesn't necessarily
get across the experience that people are having.
Fatigue can mean to you that you haven't had your coffee yet in the morning.
There are people saying that they have a very difficult time going about any of
their daily routines for months and months and months at a time, that is going to
affect people in their personal lives, but also in their working lives as well.
You've got difficulty breathing, coughs, chest pain.
A lot of these things honestly sound like Covid, except that they last for
a long time changes in menstrual cycles, muscle pain, depression or anxiety,
other psychological effects as well as health effects.
And right now, there's no like one set way that doctors know to treat this.
Instead, they're generally chasing the symptoms that people experience and
when they have trouble dealing with those or
because our generalized health care crisis.
If they have not the money to pay for it, then they might go to other sorts
of untested or unproven remedies to deal with these things.
It's regular people, lots of people.
It's also some of the elites who are thankfully drawing some attention to this.
Senator Tim Kaine said that he feels as if for
two years now as if every nerve ending in my body has had five cups of coffee.
I could feel every nerve ending right now.
As I'm talking to you, he told POLITICO,
it's just kind of a tingling in my veins all the time.
As one individual Charles McCone said before my mild infection,
I was a healthy fit, 30 year old biking 10 miles a day with no prior health issues.
The type of person the CDC says should bounce back after two weeks.
Well, it's been two years and I've yet to bounce back.
I can't work or leave the house.
I rely on my partner is a full time caretaker.
I still can't breathe right.
It's a living nightmare.
And Charles has a threat up on Twitter about that.
So, like I know that doctors are dealing with this Adrian and the people who
experienced their close family members and friends might know about it.
But I kind of almost feel like we've come out of this pandemic,
forgetting that that is still a serious concern that's affecting a lot of people.
>> Yeah, and I think that that's right up our alley as the United States often likes
to neglect people and their health issues.
And the reality is we're gonna have an entire generation of people who are gonna
be struggling with this long Covid for the rest of their lives.
And when there's all this talk about dropping Social Security and
not providing for people were damned.
We're not talking about universal health care.
It really does tell you that the United States does not care about people and
it is going to suffer in the years to come because we're going to have again this
entire generation that can't necessarily care for itself.
Or will be suffering and struggling from things and
can't contribute to the market and being able to be a part of the working class and
yet we have no support system in place for them.
This is just ridiculous.
>> Yeah, exactly.
And look, for
me, the effect on individual people is what matters we have in the chat.
I saw ghost dog says, I used to train mm a six days a week Covid ruined my life.
Like, imagine if like just the effect on like on your work on your love life, your
social life, your hobbies, those sorts of things, it can affect so many people.
But like, if the experience of individual people doesn't matter to you, it's also
a massive drain on the economy, that they're not working, thus not producing,
they're not then paying taxes on income that they would be making.
So from the government's point of view,
it seems like the sort of thing that you'd wanna deal with and
it's affecting a measurable percentage of the entire US population.
And so, look, Congress last year gave the National Institute of
Health $1 billion dollars to look into this.
They're gonna need to continue that funding doctors are gonna need to
prioritize this.
We're gonna hopefully try to figure out clusters of symptoms and
the most efficient and cost effective ways to deal with this.
But it is still a big issue and
it's gonna it's likely going to be affecting people for the rest of our life.
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