From the Washington Post today:
In communities of color, long-covid patients are tired of being sick and neglected
It has been four years since covid began burdening people with lingering symptoms often dismissed by mystified medical providers who were dubious and unwilling to help — especially when treating patients of color, according to clinicians and public health researchers. For patients of color, it is an all-too-familiar — and maddening — story.
....It’s bad enough patients of color are coping with a debilitating illness, they said. It’s all the more devastating, they said, to feel like they’re being erased — from medical records, public imagination and policy considerations. Researchers say that in many cases, people are not even being formally diagnosed, meaning they’re suffering and not getting help.
This story is one that I've seen a thousand times: someone (or some group) claims that doctors are ignoring their valid medical complaints of one kind or another. In this particular story, it's Black people and long COVID.
But go ahead and read the story. As usual, it provides literally zero evidence of either disparate treatment or widespread ignorance. On the contrary. One of the few statistics in the piece is a confirmation that Black people and white people "received medical care for symptoms associated with long covid" at about the same rates:
Aside from this, there are some anecdotes about people being misdiagnosed—all of them from early 2020—which is completely natural when you're dealing with a new and mysterious disease like long COVID that has a panoply of different symptoms in different people.
So: are Black people being "erased"? It's possible. But the anecdotes in the story were almost certainly supplied to the reporter by activist groups, so they're essentially meaningless. It's quite likely they could find plenty of identical stories among Hispanics and white people.
This is bad journalism. If it's true that Black people face undue skepticism when they report long COVID, they deserve something better than this. If they aren't, the story should just be spiked.
This is another aspect of "shape of earth: opinions differ" reporting that gets less attention from non-Republicans - bad special interest reporting is just as cheap and easy to pump out as fascist lies and repackaged corporate PR.
When I've made this point before, I've gotten pushback about "raising awareness", and I think that's a special kind of bad. If you "make people aware" of things that are false, you lose them as soon as they realize they've been lied to.
If you want an open society, you have to treat people with respect. This means don't make shit up. Too many liberals, especially activists, are aping Republicans, and it won't work because destroying social trust and respect for truth doesn't create an open society, it breeds contempt for it.
So cut that shit out.
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It's a fact that not all doctors are created equal. Some doctors are skeptical about long covid and reluctant to diagnose it. The patients of those doctors are naturally going to feel, quite correctly, that their doctors are not taking them seriously enough. If the patients happen to belong to minority groups, they're going to suspect that their minority status is the reason why they're not taken seriously enough. For some people, suspicion promptly morphs into certainty without the need for evidence.
Seems like this is a function of the country as a whole deciding that Covid never happened.
Yeah, but I think we can probably assume this is a combination of the lack of Medicaid in several red states, the higher rate of unemployment of Blacks to begin with, the higher rate of poverty among Blacks, and an already high rate of SSA DI rejection for Blacks.
So let's say you live in a red state, have PASC, and can no longer work. You can't pay for medical treatment, your income is gone but not your expenses. For intents and purposes, if you're Black and facing houselessness, it sure feels like you're being erased.
Perhaps doctors are baffled by long covid, and both white and black people who suffer from it are frustrated. And black people have historically had their health issues ignored in the past, so it is not an irrational inference to make on their part. It may not be true, but it is possible to see where it might come from a profound lack of trust in the system.
I guess this is sort of a variant on the old joke about the NYT's last headline: "Earth Crashes into Sun: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit." Black people generally have a more difficult relationship with the health care industry than other groups, so it's no huge surprise that Black people who may have Long Covid feel neglected too. Just anecdotally, the several acquaintances I know who have been diagnosed as probably having Long Covid are all white women who complain that their symptoms were initially dismissed or downplayed by their physicians ("It's probably just menopause" one was told. Another was told it was probably just anxiety or stress and they should try therapy or yoga or something.)
Kevin appears to have misrepresented the story in order to fire off his HOT TAKE!
Major media journalism definitely has issues, but blogger hot takes usually arent any better.
From a recent article in Science News (March 4th):
Though white women like myself are most likely to be diagnosed with the disease, in a survey from the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanic and Black people were more likely to report long-lasting symptoms. Access to care could be one factor in the diagnosis discrepancy. Previous data have shown that people from these groups are less likely to have health insurance. Another factor may be the changeling nature of the disease itself. Long COVID can show up differently in different groups of people, scientists have found.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/long-covid-biomarkers-blood-paxlovid
The article has a link to check on that data if you want. But yeah, that WaPo article is probably not great at detail, because science reporting is often poorly handled by non-science-based "average" reporters.