The millions of people stuck in pandemic limbo
When the coronavirus pandemic began, Emily Landon thought about her own risk only in rare quiet moments. An infectious-disease doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, she was cramming months of work into days, preparing her institution for the virus’s arrival in the United States. But Landon had also recently developed rheumatoid arthritis—a disease in which a person’s immune system attacks their own joints—and was taking two drugs that, by suppressing said immune system, made her more vulnerable to pathogens.
Normally, she’d be confident about avoiding infections, even in a hospital setting. This felt different. “We didn’t have enough tests, it was probably around us everywhere, and I’m walking around every day with insufficient antibodies and hamstrung T-cells,” she said.
Two years later, Covid-19 is still all around us, everywhere, and millions of people like Landon are walking around with a compromised immune system. A significant proportion of them don’t respond to Covid vaccines, so despite being vaccinated, many are still unsure whether they’re actually protected—and some know that they aren’t. Much of the United States dropped COVID restrictions long ago; many more cities and states are now following. That means policies that protected Landon and other immunocompromised people, including mask mandates and vaccination requirements, are disappearing, while accommodations that benefited them, such as flexible working options, are being rolled back.
This isn’t a small group. Close to 3% of US adults take immunosuppressive drugs, either to treat cancers or autoimmune disorders or to stop their body from rejecting transplanted organs or stem cells. That makes at least 7 million immunocompromised people.
In the past, immunocompromised people lived with their higher risk of infection, but COVID represents a new threat that, for many, has further jeopardised their ability to be part of the world. From the very start of the pandemic, some commentators have floated the idea “that we can protect the vulnerable and everyone else can go on with their lives.” Seth Trueger, who is on immunosuppressants for an autoimmune complication of cancer, said. “How’s that supposed to work?”
He is an emergency doctor at Northwestern Medicine; he can neither work from home nor protect himself by avoiding public spaces. “How am I supposed to provide for my family or live my life if there’s a pandemic raging?” he said.
Source: The Atlantic, 16 February 2022
Further reading
Read further Covid-19 blogs and stories from staff on the frontline