A new study, titled “Long Covid – The illness narratives”, was published in Social Science & Medicine by University of Oxford and Imperial College researchers Alex Rushfortha, Emma Ladds, Sietse Wieringa, Sharon Taylor, Laiba Husain, and Trisha Greenhalgh. The authors use interviews with 55 Long Covid patients and focus groups with an additional 59 respondents to characterize illness narratives from Long Covid patients. One common theme that emerged was the “absence, for various pandemic-related reasons, of a professional witness to them”.
As the authors conclude:
This study has affirmed long Covid as a patient-defined illness which gained legitimacy largely through the stories and actions of online communities. Using a socio-narratology lens, we surfaced how these groups achieved therapeutic emplotment and a strong collective identity by the telling, re-telling and affirmation of stories.
Since we completed our data collection (October 2020), long Covid patient communities in the UK have earned a place at the policy table, with their members invited to join national guideline groups and task forces as ‘experts by experience’. While some people with long Covid remain unwell with no clear path to recovery, accounts of full and partial recovery are beginning to appear. It will be interesting to revisit the long Covid narratives in the future to see what new dialogues are occurring between those who have recovered and those who have not.
Has anyone asked the long haul covid group about companion animals they are living with? Could companion animals in close contact with humans be creating an echo chamber effect, allowing covid to remain active in a chronic way, creating the long haul effect?