08 November 2021

Long-Term COVID (Part Two): The Real Issues Around Unemployment And Jobs In The Era Of The Global Pandemic

 

Photo by: Lisanto

08 November 2021 (updated October 2022)
C.S. Sherin

(Note: This article and Part One contain many links to the CDC and other official, respected sites in order to provide the most accurate information from experts, related to the ongoing global Coronavirus pandemic. The author isn't a healthcare professional or expert, and doesn't claim to be one. The author's story and opinions are only that, and aren't meant to replace common sense or the facts and advice given by health and science experts in real time.)

There are so many things about the global pandemic, and its effects upon individuals and our society at large that have yet to be fully understood by us. There are also many ways that a narrative can go, depending on who is telling it, and why. Let's explore that important nuance.

For example, according to some, the millions of jobs left open this year (2021), while millions of US (United States) workers quit their jobs or remain unemployed, seems to automatically imply that people are being lazy, spoiled, or dependent on the government. (We'll unpack all of that later.) 

Yet others say that what is happening is a Workers' Revolution (or Workers' Evolution), and it is a most positive and needed change. The basic reality is that people in the US who are unemployed and/or have quit their jobs, are a part of a broader traumatized population who were desperate for help and change before the pandemic ever began. 

The gift within the pandemic was how it showed so many business owners and workers that remote work can often be the better choice. Remote work eliminates many costs and wasted time and energy. It may not be for everyone, but for millions, it has become the best choice. Along with the option for a hybrid workplace (mostly remote with some instances of commuting to work, to collaborate in person). Why? Because:

  • Commuting is expensive for workers. Some of those costs include: time and stress, cars/transportation, and the ever-fluctuating cost of gas.
  • Going in to work is expensive too. The costs for workers include: work clothes and appropriate shoes, makeup, lunch/food, processes and systems that waste time; childcare, care-giving services for loved ones who are ill; someone to walk the dog, and mental health care to deal with a dysfunctional and stressful workplace.
  • Leasing a space is incredibly expensive for business owners, as are the taxes and other costs that go with a physical space. Many small business owners cannot afford it, along with additional costs made necessary to accommodate changing needs.

It's true that many businesses can't work remotely because they provide services in person. In those cases, other changes have happened. But, we can't actually narrow down, in this way, one reason why we are seeing unprecedented situations in our country and workforce.

In Part One of this article I shared my experience of discovering that I had gotten COVID-19 in December of 2019 in Los Angeles, CA. And, how I came to realize that I have been experiencing "Long-COVID" symptoms, which gradually emerged from that time to now. Based on my experience and other evidence, I pondered how it seems the virus may take advantage of latent weaknesses in each person. 

It is interesting to see some of the studies going on related to COVID-19 and Long-COVID:

Some studies are finding that people who have had COVID-19 are more likely to develop either psychiatric or neurological problems. In fact, there is some evidence that the virus could be similar to how the encephalitis virus affects the brain: 

In continuing this Part Two of "Long-COVID, A Personal Story And The Bigger Picture," we now turn our attention to the issues of jobs and joblessness as related to current events and the pandemic.

My experience during the first year of the pandemic wasn't out of the ordinary for a self-employed person, or for a woman. By the end of 2020 I had to dissolve my five-year-old small business. (I have been a small business owner and freelancer for the last 18 and 25 years, in some shape or form.) The first part of 2020, I had spent building up a new project for that business, but it unexpectedly fell through by spring. I was also in a major transition in my work. By the end of the year, I was forced to contemplate/re-evaluate different paths to take with work and career. In the meantime, I didn't qualify for unemployment benefits. It was unfortunate that I had been in transition, and with set-backs as the pandemic began. It was an informed risk that I took at the wrong time in history.

With the required isolation, distancing, and loss of opportunities in that first year of the pandemic, I found myself on a virtual, small desert island, stranded--as so many of us did. Luckily, I did have the support of my spouse and family members, so I was not overboard without a life jacket, in the open ocean, like many US residents were. Yet, there were countless hardships I faced in the year before the pandemic, and then through the pandemic lockdown. Despite these challenges I never stopped working to build my self-employment back up, in new ways. 

As any small business person can tell you, there are 1,000s of hours of unpaid work that go into planning, building, administrating, and maintaining a business--especially in the beginning and during major transitions. During this time, I also kept up my photography (for my own sanity as much as anything), wrote a book (and have submitted it to potential publishers); and I still have a business plan I'm following. I haven't given up. But, as I will say later, in looking at all that we face collectively... the state of our country and the old, outmoded systems are making many things impossible, beyond impossible, for so many of us.

Here in the US, unemployment rates soared the highest in April of 2020 (to around 15%). Unemployment rates in 2020 became especially high for women. 

Yet, right now, in the most general of viewpoints, things are improving. Recent official statistics are showing that the unemployment rate in September of 2021 was 4.6%, that's 7.4 million people. That is still higher than pre-pandemic numbers, but still a great improvement. 

But, how accurate is the official unemployment statistic? And, what hidden numbers are left unsaid? 

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01 November 2021

Long-Term COVID (Part One) A Personal Story And The Bigger Picture

Photo by: Huyen Pham

01 November 2021 (updated October 2022)
C.S. Sherin

(NOTE: This article and part two, contain many links to the CDC and other official, respected sites, in order to provide the most accurate and up to date expert health information related to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The author isn't a health care professional or expert, and doesn't claim to be one. The author's experience, story, and opinions are only that, and aren't meant to replace common sense or the instructions given by health and science officials and experts in real time.)

About two weeks before Christmas 2019, my adult daughter and I were able to spend a couple days in Los Angeles, California. I had never traveled anywhere warm during the winter before, and had never spent any real time in LA. While we were there to meet up with a family member, most of the time we were visiting some of the main sites of interest on our own. 

One night, we went up to see the oft-filmed, supported by Leonard Nimoy and his wife (in 2001), Griffith Observatory. It was a very cold, dark, windy evening there. The view of the city was, indeed, so beautiful. The crowded observatory quickly became empty at closing time, and soon, all the buses had left. With incredibly spotty reception, we were quite lucky to get a signal long enough to get a Lyft to transport us back to our hotel, in the iconic, old neighborhood of Westwood. It was quite a trek back, and we quickly discovered that our driver was incredibly sick. The car's heat was set so high that it felt oppressively humid and hot. The driver kept coughing, with labored breathing. I asked if he was okay. He replied that he was. I felt deeply concerned...for him and for us. He had the window cracked, and that was all the fresh air that we managed to have. During that car ride I knew the possibility of getting whatever it was he had was quite high. I had never been sick for a Christmas holiday, and wasn't happy about that exposure. 

[Yet, I never even faintly imagined the near future that would confront us so soon, in the Spring of 2020: a global pandemic, masks, controversy, gaslighting, and willful misinformation. And now, not quite two years later...there are over 745,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States, and five million deaths worldwide, at the time this is written.]

We didn't know the neighborhoods of LA at night well enough to ask him to drop us off early. We were saving money too, by doing a car share, and so, he stopped for a couple other people on his way to our stop. We were in the car with him for a good 40-45 minutes. 

Fast forward to not even two weeks later, days before Christmas in 2019 in Wisconsin. I have a very strange cold. I'm talking to my sister about it on the phone. One day I feel normal, the next day I feel so strange...kind of sick, kind of not sick. Some days my nose is runny and I'm slightly congested, the next day I feel fine, but also odd. By Christmas Eve and Christmas I was quite under the weather, not feeling well at all.

Fast forward to after Christmas. The virus is gone, but I've lost my sense of smell. Normally, I have a keen sense of smell, so this was a most notable loss. Perfume and deodorant had no smell. Freshly baked cookies had no smell or taste. My favorite foods offered no flavor. After a week of no sense of smell, I became concerned; but no one around me thought it was a big deal. I continued to complain anyway, since my sense of smell was gone for somewhere around a month! After that, it slowly came back.

By March of 2020, when the COVID-19 outbreak first started to be reported, I had forgotten about the strange virus and loss of smell that I had experienced not long before that. I think this is because information, a clear and definite list of symptoms, and a better global picture of the pandemic emerged very slowly throughout 2020 and on into 2021. So, I didn't realize that I had contracted the virus before it became globally recognized.

It was not until I received the full Pfizer vaccine in April of 2021 that I found news articles stating that COVID-19 likely had been spreading through Los Angeles (and other locations in the USA) in December of 2019, well before the WHO (World Health Organization) recognized the outbreak in Wuhan, China. Then, the memories came flooding back to me: the loss of smell for so long, talking on the phone with my sister about how strange a virus it was; seeing my mother-in-law when I had the virus, and weeks later, her telling me what a strange cold virus she had. I shuddered to think of how I had endangered my loved one's lives without knowing; and at how lucky we were. Funny enough, neither my daughter or spouse contracted the virus when I had it. At least not visibly. Which lines up with story upon story from friends, who are in other states in huge cities, have told me...of people they know, living together and/or in close daily contact, where only one person got the virus (at least in ways that are obvious and visible...but, sometimes, also verified through testing). This certainly hasn't been an easy virus to understand! It certainly didn't help any citizen that the Trump/Pence administration dismantled the pandemic readiness plan, which had been in place since 2015, shortly before the pandemic occurred.

I began realizing the deeper ramifications of my having COVID-19 without knowing what it was. Ever since I had that virus in December of 2019, I definitely have experienced many of the long-term Covid-19 symptoms, including something called "COVID Toe," which is swelling, discoloration, and sores that appear on the toes, fingers, and sometimes the arm to wrist. I've experienced all of that. I have always been prone to skin issues, but I wasn't sure what the new skin rash phenomenon was. Also, it was intermittent and nothing major, so it was hard to link together in real time.

For me, all of the various long-term COVID symptoms happened very gradually, and only got worse--to a concerning point, over a time period of about a year and a half. I have always had seasonal allergies, related skin issues; and in midlife, a small, minor amount of joint pain in my foot. It seems possible that, for some people, the virus may capitalize on vulnerabilities and latent issues, increasing them over time.

So, some of my long-term COVID-19 symptoms became increasingly disruptive and problematic, much like the article, "What Covid-19's long tail is revealing about disease" (David Cox, BBC Future) describes:

"The peak age seems to be between 35 and 49, and they report a mysterious range of symptoms....The most common symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, muscle and joint pain, sleep disturbances, migraines, chest pain, skin rashes, new sensitivities to smells and tastes, and dysautonomia....for many long Covid patients who were not admitted to hospital, symptoms come and go in three separate waves....A month after the initial infection, a third wave of symptoms appears, including skin rashes, muscle pain, new allergies, and brain fog. "This is the most concerning, because this wave of symptoms just continues to get gradually worse, peaking at around four months, and then just keeps going," says Weis."  
     ~ David Cox, "What Covid-19's long tail is revealing about disease," 09 June 2021, BBC Future                                                         

Science and healthcare experts explain, the vaccine for COVID-19 teaches the body's immune system how to defend against the virus through demonstration and practice.

Through frequent reading of scientific journals and articles in the first year, and through the grapevine of personal accounts, I learned that some people who have had COVID found that they felt better, and their health improved from having the vaccine. Scientists also confirmed this unexpected discovery. I truly hoped that I was one of those people. When I went for the vaccines I told my body to make the most of it! 

The first vaccine caused me to feel extremely tired for at least two days, and I had a fever. In addition, as the vaccine taught my immune system what to do, I experienced pain in my feet, and other parts of my body were very sore as well. I trusted that my body, learning what to do from the mRNA vaccine, was honing in on where the COVID-19 virus had particularly affected my body. I also felt pain and discomfort moving through my head, eyes, and sinus areas. And then, like a light-switch being turned off on a timer, after two days, the symptoms were gone and I felt completely normal, aside from a slightly sore arm.

In the weeks after that, my energy was more consistent, and the alarming pain in my toe joints had greatly lessened. The best news of all, my capacity to breathe deeply went back to normal. With that experience, I was eager to be fully vaccinated. 

Upon getting the second vaccine two weeks later, I again felt very tired, but only for a day and a half. And, some of my lymph nodes swelled tenderly. My arm remained quite sore for a while, and the lymph nodes slowly returned to normal after the day and a half. Besides that, after that short period of time, I felt completely well again.

When I got my Pfizer vaccines at the state university, I joined the CDC texting support for the vaccine, called "vsafe." Since the vaccine was experimental when I got it, it was great to be able to submit my symptoms and contribute to research. Through submission of my symptoms and ongoing experiences, they know that the full vaccination improved my health. I just got a text from them the other day with a link to report on how the booster is, when I get it.

It has now been a little over six months since I was fully vaccinated, and I'm noticing that my toe joints are again becoming more painful. They are sometimes sore during the day, and often when I wake up in the morning. They are also a source of intermittent sharp pain sometimes when I walk...but, still, not as alarmingly bad as they had become before I got the vaccinations. And recently, sometimes one of my fingers will swell and become painful for no reason for days. I still feel much better than I did before I got the vaccines. 

I have good reason to think that the mRNA vaccine taught my body how to resolve and eliminate the unwanted long-term effects of the COVID-19 virus. And, the booster, like most vaccine boosters, is meant to reinforce that lesson for the immune system.

Multiple things can be true. For example: Big Pharma sucks. Our government is influenced by corrupt billionaires, and in many instances our government officials are corrupt billionaires. And yet, Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
       ~ Melinda Van Slyke, Heart Of The Sky Fair Trade

I am certainly eager to get the booster. The effects of long-term COVID-19 aren't severe with me, but they were getting severe, and the vaccine helped me tremendously. Some symptoms haven't come back at all.

Qualifying to get a COVID-19 booster right now falls under many categories, like: age, immune-compromised conditions/underlying medical conditions, long-term care facilities, and 18+ living or working in high-risk settings. One of the bigger priorities for boosters must be for Black and Indigenous peoples, and people of color...who are disproportionately affected by the virus. 

For people like me, in the age category of 18-49, who have had the full Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, there are many underlying medical conditions that qualify for the booster now. Some conditions that qualify that you may not expect are: mental health issues, race/ethnicity, overweight or obesity, obesity and race/ethnicity, diabetes, and smoking (current or former). 

That being said, I know of a (white) woman who is 65 years old who works in a high risk setting, whose hospital refused to give her a booster recently, claiming that she didn't qualify. I'm not certain why they would say that. But, if hospitals and clinics aren't being helpful, there are other choices. In the region I live in, Walgreens and Walmart provide vaccines. And, sometimes our state university campus and county health building offer free vaccine clinics for the community as well. Actually, all COVID vaccines are free for everyone! Make sure that you aren't charged for your vaccine.

Here is a USA resource for finding COVID vaccinations near you.

There are so many accounts of long-term COVID that have devastated people's lives and their ability to function or maintain relationships and employment. In part two, I will continue to tell my story, and share many crucial major points from the bigger picture.

This is the end of PART ONE of this story. Stay tuned next week for PART TWO: Issues Of Employment & Unemployment In The Era Of The Global Pandemic....and Long COVID...


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