Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler.

This week I want to talk about long COVID, and I want to do it in a slightly different format

than we normally use. So here's why this is on our minds. Both the World Health Organization

and the US government have in their own different ways declared an end to the COVID-19 public

health emergency. And it's not hard to understand why. The herd got pretty immune. COVID still

kills a lot of people, month by month, but it really is just much less deadly and less

disruptive now than it was for the first three years of the pandemic. Political leaders

in both parties here, and I think also abroad, have this very palpable desire to put COVID

in the rearview mirror, at least as this burden that requires asking citizens to inconvenience

themselves on behalf of others. Republicans here are still fighting about vaccines and other

COVID adjacent things, but there's no more political fight over masking or lockdowns. All

of that ended quite a while ago. And honestly speaking just personally, it's kind of nice not

to wake up literally every morning worrying about and thinking about this horrible pandemic

and how it's upended so many things we cared about or took for granted. And it's genuinely

great that fewer people are getting sick and dying from day to day. But memory hole in

COVID has perverse consequences too. For instance, we've lost at least judging by public

discourse, any sense of obligation to people who are suffering from long-term effects of the

disease. What happens to them now? What can people who have long COVID do to seek answers?

Who is trying to find those answers for them? Are they making any progress? And is the back

burnering of COVID-19 as a sort of public health or political issue slowing that progress down?

These questions are pertinent to this show because I think it'd be pretty dreadful to just tell

thousands or millions of people suffering with long COVID symptoms, sorry you're on your own now.

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