Lauren Dempsey, MS in Biomedicine and Law, RN, FISM News
An October report sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine detailed new recommendations — including mandated masking and social distancing — to protect people from possible “Long COVID.”
The report also suggests that essentially a blank check of private and public funds should be provided for the very groups that helped formulate the recommendations.
The recommendations come at a time when the majority of America has put COVID in the rearview mirror and is still reeling from the effects of mandates imposed on the American public, most of which proved largely ineffective in mitigating the spread of the disease.
Digital designers research ‘Long COVID’
HHS commissioned a team of visual designers, design researchers, a communication manager, and a motivational speaker from a digital design company named Coforma — not exactly a panel of health experts — to study long COVID. The team worked “with people with Long COVID, their caregivers, health care providers, advocates, and other subject-matter experts.”
Coforma was created in 2017 by Eduardo Ortiz and Ashleigh Axios. Ortiz had previously held the title of Executive Creative Director at the U.S. Digital Service, a digital design group created by President Barack Obama in 2014. According to its website, Coforma works with the government to create design solutions to improve people’s lives in areas of health, immigration, veterans’ services, voting, and civic engagement, as well as access to justice and equity.
The authors of the report worked with various government employees as well as “Long COVID advocacy groups” to recruit more than 60 individuals to participate in the study, which focused on the individuals’ “lived experience” of having long COVID. The authors also looked at other factors that may impact the burden of Long COVID such as the severity of the disease and social determinants of health which determine the resources, support, or barriers that a person may or may not have to access healthcare.
Distancing, masking, and mass messaging
According to the report, the trauma from having Long COVID is not understood by “a general public that is impatient for a return to business as usual” or public health officials, who lack urgency. The lifting of lockdowns and mitigation strategies like mask-wearing, it claims, is insensitive to those who struggle with being in public places and “further isolates people with long COVID.”
To remedy this, the document authors suggest that the federal government reimplement authoritarian and draconic health measures to prevent long COVID. They suggest federal messaging on the dangers of Long COVID, mandated masking and social distancing in public places, launching mass messaging campaigns to increase literacy and awareness, and promoting vaccination and mental health awareness.
The HHS-commissioned report focuses on an ideal treatment journey as well as implementing public policy changes to help individuals with Long COVID feel less isolated and to protect “everyone from Long COVID.”
However, many of the recommendations that the authors suggest to prevent Long COVID — like masking and social distancing — failed to prevent the transmission or infection of COVID-19 and all of its sub-variants.
‘Unrestricted funding’
Many of the other recommendations made by the group are entirely centered on providing numerous streams of funding for “Long COVID advocacy groups,” such as those that helped create the report.
Specifically, the report recommends “unrestricted funding from private donors and foundations to advocacy and support organization, so that they can self-determine how when, and towards what resources are used.” It also suggests the advocacy groups receive proceeds from pharmaceutical companies, contracts with researchers, and donations from the public with charitable giving write-offs for such donations increased “to 100 percent of one’s adjusted gross income to incentive charitable giving from American taxpayers.”
The report also suggests taxpayer funding for focus on “diversity, equity, and inclusion-related outreach,” and comprehensive data tracking of individuals with Long COVID.
Defining ‘Long COVID’
Long COVID is still not well understood by experts, as individuals experience wide-ranging symptoms. The most commonly reported symptoms are fatigue, brain fog, insomnia, shortness of breath, palpitations, depression, anxiety, and loss or change to the senses of smell and taste. People have also reported hallucinations, tremors, and tinnitus as a result of Long COVID. Some patients report having symptoms that are debilitating, preventing them from returning to work or performing activities of daily living.
Vaccination to prevent COVID-19 infection has been considered by HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to be the key recommendation for preventing Long COVID. A study published in Nature Medicine earlier this year showed that vaccination lowered the risk of Long COVID by only about 15%, and there were no differences in the type or severity of symptoms in vaccinated or unvaccinated individuals.
According to the CDC, 1 in 5 adults have symptoms of Long COVID and overall 7.5% of American adults will have symptoms that last more than three months after the initial COVID-19 infection.