90-Second Read: As Hantavirus and Ebola Cases Rise, Long COVID Is Being Forgotten

Concerns about Ebola or Hantavirus being a new pandemic are rising, but for the millions with Long COVID, we're still in this one. 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. There is no vaccine yet for Hantavirus or Ebola, whose mortality rates are both higher than COVID. People are still being impacted by this disease, including becoming permanently disabled and contracting new cases.

In the previous 28-day period, 27,615 new cases were reported. Even as other viruses that pose less of a threat to the public in the United States have spikes in cases, COVID is still with us and continues to be a mass-disabling event. Not only are we not keeping new cases and those impacted by Long COVID in mind, we are not putting the lessons of the COVID pandemic into practice, such as masking. 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.

Ignoring or minimizing COVID contributes to delays in diagnosis or care and causes the mental health of people living with Long COVID to suffer. Other Long COVID symptoms he experienced included extreme fatigue, so much he was sleeping 12 hours a day without a dent in his exhaustion, and brain fog that impacted his ability to speak coherently. Even a single COVID infection has been linked to new health problems developing after recovery. In a piece published in March of this year, Harvard Health characterized measles as "making a comeback." But people want to forget about measles as they want to forget COVID.

In addition to COVID, we live in a world facing increasing rates of multiple infectious diseases mutating, in large part due to climate change and habitat loss, and diseases stretching into new areas where they had previously been unreported. For those of us living with Long COVID, such comments are beyond frustrating. This rapidly shrinking number of Long COVID clinics, unequally distributed across the United States, with zero care facilities in rural areas, is despite the fact that the number of people with Long COVID is only growing.