Long COVID still has no cure — so these patients are turning to research

these new diseases are stubbornly unknowable. They exist without cause, course, or cure. They are nothing more or less than their self-reported symptoms. They are metaphor as illness.

the COVID-19 pandemic has given us a keen sense of how variable the human response to infection can be, vividly dramatizing the ways that a virus or bacterium (or multiple viruses and bacteria) can collide with an individual’s biology to unleash a host of perplexing aftereffects in the body, often incited by the individual’s immune system. The scop

Disability scholars are now pushing past the medical-social binary and toward—as the critic Jonathan Sterne helpfully puts it—“a conception of biology as having historical dimensions, and history as having biological dimensions.”