A Highly Discriminating Disease

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

 

On Wednesday, Politico contributed one more inexplicable data point to the set of inscrutable mysteries around the phenomenon known as “long Covid.”

 

Citing evidence from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Center for National Health Statistics, the report detailed the rising death rate attributable to the condition. Between January 2020 and June 2022, 3,455 people succumbed while also suffering from “chronic” or “long-haul Covid.” That’s a lot of people, though less than one one-hundredth of a percent of the estimated 23 million sufferers in the United States. And yet, in Politico’s telling, the available evidence indicates that this syndrome targets a remarkably narrow group of Americans.

 

“The report also found that the vast majority—or 78.5 percent—of the deaths attributed to long Covid were among white Americans,” the report continued. In addition, clinics devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of long Covid are overwhelmed with patients who share this demographic profile. “The relatively few patients who do get treated are overwhelmingly white and affluent enough to be able to take time off work to go to multiple appointments and spend time online finding care and support groups,” the report continued.

 

The implication in this sentence, which is crafted in such a way as to make the inference deniable, is that Americans of minority descent are incapable of accessing care for this condition. “Affluent” seems a much likelier indication than does “white” of how likely an individual is to devote hours of unremunerated time treating a malady. It soon becomes clear what was intended with the introduction of this subtly manipulative clause. Long covid patients and researchers alike are coming for your taxpayer dollars.

 

Politico’s dispatch is, in fact, a vehicle for the promotion of The CARE for Long COVID Act, which seeks $25 million to help the CDC diagnose and treat the condition. The article jabs the Biden administration for failing to properly fund research on long Covid and educate the public about what it involves. It’s an odd allegation. In December 2021, Congress appropriated a staggering $1.5 billion in funds for the National Institutes of Health to “support research into the prolonged health consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection.” In addition, private research hospitals are recruiting patients and conducting tests to explore a phenomenon that defies medical classification.

 

And yet, more funding is apparently needed, in part because America’s minority population is being mistreated. “A lot of patients are being told they are just anxious,” said one physician referring to the primarily Hispanic population with whom she works. This, she suggests, is a misdiagnosis. But it’s an overwhelmingly common one, and that is unlikely to be the result of a vast conspiracy of racist physicians. It’s a diagnosis that is informed by the research that has already been done on long Covid and its sufferers.

 

“The thing that has struck me most now, in a year and a half of seeing these patients and extensively testing them, is that we are finding little to no abnormalities,” said Dr. Michael Sneller, an infectious disease specialist and the co-author of a study on long covid patients for the National Institutes of Health, last year. He’d run his patients through a battery of tests but could find no markers of organ dysfunction and “precious little evidence of immune activation.” He added: “I’m running out of tests to do, basically.”

 

It’s been a year since Sneller offered that observation, and medical research continues to support the conclusion he would not allow himself to reach. A detailed dispatch on this phenomenon published in the New Republic, which is sympathetic to the ordeal suffered by Covid’s “long-haulers” and the many physical manifestations of its symptoms, nonetheless was forced to concede the doctor’s point. Accounting for the potential unavailability of PCR testing, false negatives, and even the possibility that Covid antibodies fade over time or failed to materialize at all, “over two-thirds” of participants in one study produced negative antibody tests, which suggests “at least some portion of them never had Covid-19 to begin with.”

 

Earlier this year, a study published in the journal JAMA Psychology determined that one of the few features that reliably indicate an individual’s increased risk of suffering from the residual effects of a Covid infection was “preexisting psychological distress.” Researchers found that people struggling with an array of psychiatric conditions, including anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, and loneliness, were as much as 50 percent more likely to endure long-term complications from a Covid infection.

 

Likewise, a German study conducted by researchers with the Technical University of Dresden found that children and adolescents were at equal risk of developing long Covid symptoms despite their lower risk of severe infection. In addition, children were more likely to develop mental health disorders as a result of struggling with long Covid. Though a write-up of the study noted that kids “who’d gotten COVID-19 were 30% more likely to exhibit long COVID symptoms than those who hadn’t.”

 

The fact that someone wrote that sentence down without recognizing what it implies is a perfect encapsulation of this peculiarity. The mounting evidence that suggests this ailment is psychological in nature doesn’t detract from the physical ordeal endured by those who suffer from it. Nor would this be the first time in history that the reclassification of a condition as primarily mental failed to validate its sufferers, which “upsets patients.” Proper classification would, in fact, help ease the suffering of those who are struggling. The mystery of it is part of its torment. But as Politico confessed, this is an illness to which American elites are uniquely susceptible. And its existence may yet shake loose some public funds from the Treasury.