The fight of those suffering long COVID forms a frontline against the tyranny of the dying capitalist system. According to the advocacy network Long COVID Alliance, 9.4 million Americans have been affected by long COVID, a little more than one in ten who have contracted the disease. According to the American Medical Association (AMA), as many as 30% of those who contract the disease will suffer long term effects. That would mean close to 26 million people in the United States, and 158 million worldwide, projected to have long term symptoms of the disease.
In a March newsletter, the AMA’s Devang Sanghavi explained that a significant number of these patients suffer long COVID due to direct cell damage to the lungs, kidneys, heart, liver, and the brain. Like most chronic disease, all these conditions are harder to understand and fight than the immediate symptoms of a COVID infection. This has caused COVID “long-haulers,” as they tend to self-identify, to band together into support groups, most notably the UK group internationally spearheading this fight called Long COVID Support, which campaigns “for recognition, rehabilitation, and research into treatments.”
According to The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness author Meghan O’Rourke, writing in the March Scientific American, “Medical science has increasingly understood that infections can trigger ongoing physical symptoms in a subset of people, yet the medical establishment has typically ignored the experiences of those people. Such conditions include myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), so-called chronic Lyme disease, and more.” O’Rourke sees the work done by COVID long haulers as helping the medical community turn a corner on diseases difficult to quantify and easier to stigmatize. According to the National Institutes of Health, such conditions include chronic pain, asthma, diabetes, and heart disease, all conditions understood to exponentially correlate, both in occurrence and severity, with poverty. O’Rourke ends her article with a call for “the full force of science’s power” to address the needs of these sufferers.
The struggle facing patients with long COVID brings their work together with those who fight other chronic illnesses because they exist in a space underserved by the current medical establishment. A May Business Insider profiled health care workers who suffer symptoms of long COVID, showing how the condition hurts people economically. The same story finds long COVID causes many of today’s employee shortages. “These are bus drivers, laborers, physicians, nurses,” Dr. Greg Vanichkachorn told a congressional committee last February. “The challenge ahead of us with long-haul COVID is not just a healthcare challenge, but a challenge for our society and our economy as well.”
Indeed, the concept of long COVID might be understood as a unifying struggle for millions of Americans fighting for their lives and fighting for the quality of their lives. A March Pew Research study found that half of non-retired Americans are deeply concerned about their finances in the wake of the pandemic, more than half among lower income adults. While the wealthiest Americans made billions off the pandemic, at least half of those who lost money during the pandemic are still working for less money, and lower income adults are struggling worse than before.
The pandemic highlights the worsening symptoms of an economy that has long ago left workers behind by replacing labor power with robotics and an accumulation of wealth based in speculation. Capitalism always ripped off workers, making the ruling class richer than any ruling class in history, globalizing the economy, and fighting to control every conceivable market. Wealth accumulates when employers extract surplus from the worker’s pay. However, with the digital revolution, the workers have less value to employers with each robotic innovation. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries largely control the medical industry, and all these capitalist machines value profits over people.
Fighting chronic illness, our class fights a sick system. Gutting its own working class for larger speculative gains and market shares, the ruling class focuses its energy on maintaining control in this dying system. Those workers being cast out of the system by chronic illness are fighting forward to the world that wants to be born, a world where all this new technology no longer furthers the control of a handful of tyrants but vastly improves the quality of all our lives in countless unquantifiable ways.
Published: May 31, 2022
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