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The Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter · Jun 5, 2026

“During Covid,” “Post Covid,” “PTSD from Covid,” “Moving on from Covid,” and more

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John Dupuis · The Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter!

First of all, everyone should run over to sign the Change.org petition to Rename the Williamsburg Bridge as the Sonny Rollins Bridge. There’s lots of information on the petition about Sonny Rollins and his special relationship to the Williamsburg Bridge and why it would be a great idea to move ahead with the renaming. We lost Rollins a week or so ago, and this would be a fitting remembrance for one of the giants of 20th century music. There’s more at the Sonny Rollins Bridge Project website. This week’s musical interlude also remembers Rollins.

Second of all, it’s nice to see an actually pretty decent article in Canadian Affairs, a mainstream Canadian publication, about Long Covid: The long shadow of long COVID.

Sadly, all the wonderfulness of the Canadian Affairs piece is totally ruined by the absolutely terrible article in Wired. You’re probably seen it, it’s in the “It’s all in your head” genre of articles about Long Covid. There are some great takedowns on Xitter by Tern and Arijit Chakravarty. And probably others as well. If you’ve seen a good one, please feel free to drop a link in the comments. There’s a good one here, Revisiting the Painful Truth about Long Covid, which I’ll feature in more detail next week.

That rather nice Canadian Affairs article was perhaps setting us all up for some more extreme disappointment from the rest of the week. Some truly epic WTFkery of the Week Award laureates in this issue.

For example, there’s a classic “no shib Sherlock” with a study that suggests more Canadian kindergartners are experiencing developmental vulnerabilities after COVID-19. It’s Covid, people. It’s caused by the kids getting sick over and over with Covid. Not a few months of learning from home 4 or 5 years ago.

And hey, news we all need to know: Ebola, hantavirus… how eroding global health cooperation could threaten worse crises ahead. And nearly 60 Idahoans sick after drinking raw milk in past two weeks, officials say. What are we even doing?

Like! Share! Subscribe! Ebola/Hantavirus play by play at the very end!

There is currently no paid subscription option for this newsletter and I do not have any plans to switch to that model. However, Substack does have an option where subscribers can pledge to subscribe “just in case” and a few of you have done so. I very much appreciated the vote of confidence in what I’m doing here. If you want to send a little “Thank You” I have a Ko-fi tip jar set up. It. My plan is to spend whatever is donated by supporting artists on Bandcamp.

Buy me a coffee!

“During Covid.” “During the pandemic.” “When Covid was around.” “When Covid happened.” “Back in the pandemic.” “Back during Covid.”

Every time I hear one of these phrases, I die a little inside. …

My friends and family continue to refer to Covid in the past tense, as if it no longer exists, despite seeing me living daily with a mask to protect myself from the very thing they say no longer exists. They reminisce and recall the early days when they “had” to wear respirators and face shields, and isolate, and test, and lock down (though I learned later that many of my friends who complained about locking down in the U.S. didn’t actually experience the same kind of actual “lockdown” that many of us abroad were experiencing.).

For those in the back, Covid is not over. Covid is still part of my daily reality, and all of theirs, even though they are loath to recognize or admit it.

Persistent symptoms were common during the medium-term post-infection period, while formal long COVID diagnoses and healthcare encounters explicitly attributed to COVID-19 were relatively uncommon in routine clinical records at five years. These findings highlight the challenges of recognising and attributing long-term post-COVID manifestations in clinical practice and suggest that the burden of long-term post-COVID symptoms may be under-recognised in healthcare systems.

It was when a self-described science podcaster used the phrase “post-COVID” in a social media graphic that I had to speak up. I don’t normally comment on businesses’ or strangers’ posts, but the use of such a biased, unscientific phrase motivated me to post a comment in protest.

“Post-COVID” is a woefully inaccurate term. While, in the current moment, we are no longer at the peak of COVID—often defined as extreme waves of deaths and hospitalizations—we do not and will never live in a “post-COVID” world. People are still being impacted by this disease, including becoming permanently disabled and contracting new cases. …

The latest examples of this are the Andes strain of hantavirus, with a cluster of cases coming from a Dutch-flagged cruise ship in May, and Ebola, with new cases confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a rapidly escalating outbreak.

News of both viruses raced through social media, with many posts fear-mongering or spreading inaccurate information. Repeatedly, I read the phrase “I can’t do another pandemic,” implying the poster could not bear to get vaccines, stay inside, socially distance, or wear a mask.

For those of us living with Long COVID, such comments are beyond frustrating. The reason we have post-COVID syndrome is because not enough people cared to do a pandemic and follow medical guidance the first time around, including getting vaccinated and boosted and wearing masks—community care our community should still be doing.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced people across the U.S. to a global health emergency that they may have never imagined.

That experience is coloring how some people are thinking about Ebola and hantavirus, public health and infectious disease experts say. Fear around exotic-sounding diseases has always existed, but now people know how a pandemic can change their life.

As Chandra Harvey, a content creator on Instagram whose joking video about another possible pandemic received over 100,000 views, told NPR: “We’re all dealing with PTSD from COVID.”

For Harvey, COVID-19 “heavily impacted” her family, with a few relatives hospitalized. “COVID scarred all of us,” she said.

“Misinformation is not primarily a communication challenge. It is a trust problem,” said Mardini.

“Trust must be treated as a strategic public asset,” said Dr Sopon Iamsirithaworn, Deputy Secretary of Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health.

“People don’t follow health measures just because they receive information. What really matters is whether they trust the system and believe in the message they hear.”

But, he added, in Thailand “trust doesn’t come from the centre alone. It is built at the community level with trusted people on the ground, including our village health volunteers who live in the community”.

Health authorities and governments are no match for the speed and scale at which chatbots and generative AI can generate fake information. But there are tools to dismantle some fake news.

The WHO and health authorities around the world have been quick to reassure the public that the Hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship won’t be the beginning of a new pandemic, but as Professor Trisha Greenhalgh of Oxford University has said, “this is the dress rehearsal of the next major pandemic.” This is an opportunity for authorities and institutions to demonstrate the lessons learned from Covid, however information coming out of organisations like the WHO, national health authorities and the media hasn’t provided the clarity and consistency of communication that was identified as an issue in 2020 requiring improvement.

This is a serious regional emergency, not a likely COVID-style global pandemic.

The biggest concern is that this is Bundibugyo Ebola in exactly the kind of setting where Ebola becomes hard to stop: mining corridors, border movement, displaced populations, poor trust, health-system strain, conflict, and no licensed strain-matched vaccine.

The next key indicators are:

whether Uganda develops independent transmission chains,

whether Bunia becomes a sustained urban transmission hub,

whether contact follow-up improves above 80–90%,

whether healthcare-worker infections continue,

and whether response teams can safely access affected zones.

Right now: containment is still possible, but the response is behind the outbreak

Government estimates peg the number of Canadians experiencing long COVID symptoms at 2.1 million, although it last collected this data in June 2023.

And yet, despite the high numbers, doctors and researchers say public interest in the condition is low.

“Most people want to not think about [COVID] anymore,” said Dr. Satish Raj, a Calgary cardiologist who regularly sees long COVID patients and University of Calgary professor. “People want to move on.”

But for Wood and those like her, moving past the virus is impossible.

A new artificial intelligence study published last week in JAMA Network Open has found that roughly one in six Americans who contracted COVID-19 developed long COVID, more than double the rate captured by current federal surveillance. The findings, led by researchers at Mass General Brigham, lay bare a public health crisis hiding in plain sight, one systematically obscured by the very diagnostic tools that health systems and policymakers rely upon to track it. …

Perhaps the most alarming finding is that there is no plateau in sight. Cumulative prevalence continued rising through at least mid-2024, with statistical modeling pointing to sustained growth over the coming decade if current patterns hold. Roughly 14.5 percent of infected patients developed new chronic conditions requiring sustained clinical care, among them heart disease, diabetes, cognitive impairment, fatigue syndromes, and metabolic and endocrine disorders. The researchers are explicit that long COVID should be understood as a chronic disease burden rather than a self-limited post-viral syndrome. Its systemic undercounting, they warn, impedes both epidemiologic surveillance and coordinated clinical management and may partly explain the observed post-pandemic increases in diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and fatigue syndromes.

1. The Naturalist. You probably know a Naturalist. They may say things like, “My body doesn’t need vaccines, I prefer natural protection.” They see “clean” living and “food is medicine” as real prevention, and view vaccines as meddling with a system that is already working. The Naturalist also frequently has concerns about ingredients, additives, and what is “really” in the shot, and often turns first to herbal remedies, supplements, or integrative medicine traditions before reaching for anything pharmaceutical. Listen for words like “natural” and “clean,” and frequent questions about ingredients. What works: engage the worldview rather than dismiss it. Reframe vaccines as something that supports the immune system rather than overrides it, and answer ingredient questions honestly and directly.

In conclusion, our exploratory study indicates that patients recovering from mild or severe COVID-19 exhibit similar outcomes in cognitive functions at least 12 weeks post-infection. However, patients with PCC often experience impaired mental health and reduced HRQoL. This may have a greater impact on patients who have experienced a mild course of COVID-19 than on those who have required intensive care. The high prevalence of incapacity to work in this group, persisting even a year after the initial infection, underscores the significance of PCC and its healthcare burden. From a clinical perspective, our findings suggest that diagnostic workups for PCC should not rely solely on objective cognitive performance but should extend to screening for mental health symptoms and fatigue, as these factors appear to contribute significantly to the subjective burden and work incapacity observed in our cohort, particularly among the younger, working-age patients predominantly found in the mild-PCC group. Consequently, rehabilitation strategies may benefit from a multimodal approach combining cognitive training with a focus on attention, psychological interventions, and fatigue management to support vocational reintegration. The potential of SARS-CoV-2 to cause long-term post-acute sequelae is not unique. Previous research has shown that certain acute infections can be associated with persistent, poorly understood chronic symptoms in a subset of patients, which are referred to as post-acute infection syndromes. These parallels highlight the critical importance of advancing fundamental research to unravel the mechanisms underlying these chronic conditions and highlight the urgency of identifying new therapies and preventive strategies. While current intervention studies investigating the efficacy of treatments such as methylprednisolone for cognitive impairment in PCC58 offer promising insights, current therapeutic options remain limited. This indicates the necessity for further research in this field.

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  1. Chronic Illness, Productivity, “Milestones,” and Feeling Behind

  2. FDA vaccine advisers recommend XFG variant as target for fall’s updated COVID vaccines | CIDRAP

  3. Study offers new insights into long COVID - Futurity

  4. Research ethics boards need urgent training on Long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis - The Sick Times

  5. Los Angeles County health department asks providers to watch for infectious diseases during World Cup

  6. Trump executive order directs CDC to ‘realign’ childhood vaccine recommendations | CIDRAP

Sonny Rollins. Global Warming (Live In Boston / 2001).

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