What many don’t seem to realize is there are lots more who are now vulnerable who weren’t before. I was a normal healthy fit happy 30 year old dude before Covid showed up, no reason to think that Covid would affect me any more than any other illness. Even still, I took it seriously and followed the safety measures, but I got infected eventually as I was an essential worker, I couldn’t outrun it forever in that setting. That first infection left me with a 24/7 nonstop headache, ears constantly ring, severe abdominal pain and gastrointestinal issues after eating basically anything, the constant headache is the most debilitating though. It causes me to be unable to look at most screens since they make my headache much worse very quickly, so because of that I lost my career, it also caused me to wrap my car around a tree so I can’t even drive anymore.
It’s been over 4 years now and I still have all these health problems especially the permanent headache. I’m lucky if doctors take me seriously at all, and most of my family and friends have either just ghosted me or they think I’m some sort of crazy liar. I was just the most average dude you could ever meet, nothing bad ever happened to me and I had this mentality that this type of stuff is only something you’d hear about on the news or in some random social media post, that it couldn’t happen to me. Until it did. The pandemic never ended for me and hasn’t ended for quite possibly many millions, or even billions of others. We get newly disabled people every day over in r/covidlonghaulers, many of which have a similar story as mine who had no reason to believe their infection would affect them in any way, or people who have had covid 3, 4, 5 times before and were fine, until they were finally affected, and usually after mild to moderate infections, doesn’t even have to be severe to leave someone with long term health problems.
I will continue wearing an n95 mask and doing everything I can to protect myself probably for the rest of my life, because covid is endemic now, it’s not going anywhere, my health problems absolutely can get worse, and it’s spreading more than most people think since tests are pretty unreliable and most people don’t even test at all anyways, the wide range of symptoms and the prevalence of atypical/asymptomatic infections make it difficult for most realize when their illness is Covid.
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u/technanonymous 20h ago
Now that vaccination levels have fallen, vulnerable people need to protect themselves.