Still Here, March 22: Links and transcript

Summary

Long COVID is an international public health crisis, and while its effects are felt around the world, access to research and understanding about the virus is not equal.

And coming to accept one’s disabled identity when living with Long COVID can bring up an array of emotions.

In this episode of Still Here: Freelance journalist Rishabh Jain talks with co-hosts Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles Griffis about his latest reporting on how Long COVID is an economic catastrophe for marginalized workers in India and outlines the current state of Long COVID research in the country. Plus, The Sick Times’ engagement editor Heather Hogan shares how a dysautonomic battle with a racist man helped her integrate her butch lesbianism with her disability.

Also in this episode: A short recap of research from the recent Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections and the latest COVID-19 trends. 

Find our Long COVID news and commentary podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, or listen below and jump to the start of the podcast transcript.

Jump to a specific part of the transcript:

• Intro
• COVID-19 trends
• Long COVID in India
• Claiming Long COVID identity
• Research
• Outro

Still Here overlaps with The Sick Times’ newsletter, which publishes weekly.

Mentioned in this episode (in order of appearance):

• Submit a voice memo reflecting on over 5 years of COVID-19 and Long COVID
• The Sick Times: National COVID-19 trends, March 18
• CDC wastewater dashboard
• Biobot wastewater risk reports
• WastewaterSCAN dashboard
• The Sick Times: “There is no money to survive”: Long COVID pushes India’s marginalized workers deeper into poverty
• The Sick Times: Live blog: International demonstrations ignite for Long COVID Awareness Day
• The Sick Times: The sick soft butch who did: How confronting a racist in my neighborhood helped me claim my Long COVID identity
• Autostraddle: The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better)
• The Sick Times: Research updates, March 18
• The Sick Times: HIV may increase the risk of Long Covid. Why aren’t major advocacy groups addressing it?

Additional audio in this episode: 

• Rude Mechanical Orchestra: Which Side Are You On? (orig. Florence Reece) 
• Pixabay: Thunder and the beginning of rainfall

Transcript

Intro (0:00) 

[Instrumental snippet of theme song, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s rendition of “Which Side Are You On?” begins playing.]

James Salanga: Welcome to Still Here, a Long COVID news and commentary podcast from The Sick Times.

Miles Griffis: Hey, I’m Miles Griffis.

Betsy Ladyzhets: And I’m Betsy Ladyzhets. 

[Instrumental ends]

Betsy: We’re the co-founders of The Sick Times. 

James: I’m James Salanga, and I’m Still Here’s producer.

Miles: Many public health authorities are ignoring the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Betsy: But here at The Sick Times, we’re not. So we continue to bring you the latest Long COVID news and commentary each week.

Miles: Without pandemic denial, minimizing, or gaslighting.

James: And we’ll do that in our newsletter, our website, our social media platforms, and, of course, this podcast.

Betsy: We share the latest on COVID-19 trends.

James: Then we talk about one or a few of the stories we’ve published on the Sick Times website recently. In this episode, freelance reporter Rishabh Jain will discuss his reporting on how Long COVID has compounded inequality and poverty for marginalized people in India.

And our engagement editor Heather Hogan will talk about her essay about how confronting a racist in her neighborhood helped her embrace her Long COVID identity.

Miles: We’ll also share some of what’s happening in Long COVID research.

Today’s research update is a special edition short recap of the conference for retroviruses and opportunistic infections, also called CROI, that was held in San Francisco, California last week.

While the conference focuses on HIV and related diseases in recent years, including this one, it’s also included research on Long COVID, COVID-19, and their impacts on people with HIV. This year, there were at least 24 papers looking at Long COVID. We’ll look at some of those papers later on, as well as some exciting news, potentially, about Ensitrelvir, an antiviral that may be used as post-exposure prophylaxis, aka PEP.

James: Also, a quick sidebar. We’re looking for folks to share their thoughts for a special call-in/audio collage podcast episode or episodes about what five years of the pandemic has meant for them.

We have a Google form with some suggested prompts to muse on five years of COVID, Long COVID, linked in our transcript, or at tinyurl.com/tst5yearspod. You can submit a recorded answer there, or you can email me at james@thesicktimes.org.

Now, let’s get to our COVID forecast.

[Sound of thunderclap and light rain]

COVID-19 forecast (2:30)

Betsy: So this week’s COVID-19 forecast is kind of similar to the last couple of weeks.

COVID-19 metrics continue to show that disease levels are going down, but they’re not going down particularly fast. It’s more of a slow decline than like a rapid deceleration. And this is a bit different than what we’ve seen the last couple of years around this time of year.

So if you look at, you know, early 2022, 2023, 2024, all of those years, there was a big winter surge followed by a real sort of sharp decline and then a lull, you know, in the early spring to summer, depending on where in the country.

Whereas with this year, we didn’t have as intense of a winter surge.

The disease levels did not go up as much, but disease levels have kind of stuck around at like moderate to high levels for a while, so we’re now into, you know, mid-March and we’re still at more like moderate levels and even higher levels in some parts of the country.

So to me, what this really shows is that much as a lot of commentators and public health officials are now kind of lumping COVID in with quote unquote seasonal diseases like the flu, RSV, norovirus, COVID is really not seasonal.

Maybe, like, perhaps in the future someday it will get there, but at this time it’s still very unpredictable and still very driven by human behavior. And that kind of baseline of spread that we’re seeing in between the moments of more waves or surges that baseline just keeps getting higher and higher over time.

At the moment also, I noted that the Midwest and South seem to have more COVID-19 hotspots than the Northeast and the West Coast. There’s a bit of difference from different wastewater data providers, but the CDC, WastewaterSCAN, and Biobot all kind of identified those two regions.

And it’s also important to remember that wastewater data are only a proxy for community trends — it’s not a perfect equivalent to cases — and also that national averages gloss over a lot of regional local difference. So always good to look at your local state or community county dashboards if you have that available.

James: For more about understanding COVID in your community and how we come up with our COVID trends, we have more information in our transcript and website.

Plus, after a quick musical break, freelance reporter, Rishabh Jain will talk about his reporting about how Long COVID has impacted workers in rural India.

We’ll also hear from The Sick Times’ engagement editor Heather Hogan about how a dysautonomous battle with a racist man in Queens helped her get her Long COVID swagger back.

[instrumental segment of theme song plays]

The Sick Times: “There is no money to survive”: Long COVID pushes India’s marginalized workers deeper into poverty (5:22)

James: It’s clear Long COVID is an international health crisis.

On Long COVID Awareness Day, March 15, there were demonstrations from people living with Long COVID across the world, which you can see a chronicle of on The Sick Times’ site.

And one of our latest stories actually speaks to this wide-ranging impact of Long COVID.

Reporter Rishabh Jain spoke with day-wage workers in northern India who say Long COVID isn’t just a health and disability issue, it’s an economic catastrophe that pushes families into cycles of poverty. He also spoke with Long COVID researchers and providers to learn more about what navigating the disease in India has looked like five years into the pandemic.

Rishabh, thanks for joining us.

Rishabh Jain: Hi, nice to be here. Thank you.

James: Yeah. Well, I guess to start off, you spoke with a number of low-wage workers in rural India about the impact Long COVID has had on their lives.

What did you hear about their experiences?

Rishabh: I was able to connect to this daily wage labor called Sunaina Kumari.

I asked Sunaina, like, “What is it that you are facing?” And she said that, “I don’t know. Because when I started, it was like, initially, I recovered in three months with the first time I had the virus. But then suddenly, I don’t know what has happened to me.”

She’s unaware, and she says that “I’m unable to realize why I can’t work for, say, eight hours, which I was able to do earlier. Why? Why is it that I get so tired easily? Is it the age that is started currently hitting me? Or what is it?”

And when I was having that conversation with her, I realized, maybe for workers like her, terms like Long COVID and coronavirus feel so aloof, but they don’t know, like, what is happening with them.

And that’s when, like, she told me that she has been going through doctors, her medicine, like, every month. The amount that she used to spend on medicines has increased, the amount that she used to spend on tests has increased. And one of the doctors that she went in one of the hospitals, a government very reputed hospital told her that she might be having long COVID.

Then I also remember talking to Gudia Rani, another daily wage laborer, another person on whom the family depends.

And same stories, same situation, don’t know where to go, what to do. And the thing is, like, when these people go to district hospitals, they are supposed to get free medicines, they are supposed to get free tests done. But the medical situation here is so bad that they are even forced to buy medicines from private vendors outside the hospital, and even for tests, either there is a very long waitlist or they have to, like, bribe the people who are there.

So it’s like a loop that they are stuck in now.

First, they cannot work for the amount of hours they used to put in earlier. So that is one situation. So they’re not able to earn.

Second, the tests, the medicines, the money that they’re spending on [those] which they earlier were spending on taking care of themselves, their kids, is going away. Like, it’s decreasing continuously.

I don’t think the Indian government, the health ministry in India realizes how big the problem is.

There are individual researchers located at different parts of the country which are trying to develop tests, which are trying to do something on their own. But there is an absence of collaboration between them. They don’t know what to do.

And people like Sunaina and Gudia and thousands others are suffering.

Because I remember I, in the article, I have cited one research study which says that [of the] people in Asia who first had COVID, 50% of them have symptoms of Long COVID. So imagine the number of people who are affected by Long COVID and they might just not know about [it].

Betsy: Yeah, I think that’s something that comes up in the stories we publish at The Sick Times a lot, where, you know, we’re five years into this, there’s a lot that we know about Long COVID, there’s a lot of research that’s been done, but it’s very inequitable.

And I mean, even within the United States, there’s a lot of inequity, of course, but when you look at countries like India, I think the disparities are just so stark in what people have access to.

As you mentioned that you’ve spoke with some of these researchers and healthcare providers, what else did you learn from them in terms of like the challenges that they’re facing and trying to better understand this disease?

Rishabh: I remember talking to a researcher — Animesh Samanta, I was forgetting his name.

So Animesh is trying to develop tests using [a probe] which we can like sort of see if people have Long COVID or not, what are the impacts that it is having on the brain activity.

And he said he really wants an environment like where he can actually collaborate with researchers.

And this is what he said to me — whenever I’m taking interviews of patients, whenever I’m taking interviews of doctors, if I can put these people in touch with Animesh so that he can actually start testing these things, right?

So I think the biggest challenge currently is because it’s a huge country, which has like a lot of people who have Long COVID who don’t even realize they have Long COVID.

But there is no collaboration happening because there are no active efforts being taken from the side of the health ministry in India at the state level at the central level, which can actually initiate these collaborations, which can actually put out some funds.

When COVID happened, when the virus came, I know it was a very, very big challenge, but there was a unity. We all thought everything stopped and decided that we’ll fight this, we have to ensure that everyone is safe and everyone gets a hospital bed.

I mean, I know in India, a lot of people were not able to get it, but still there was like a unity among all the departments that we have to do this.

Now it feels like there is nothing like that, like people have just moved on, people have forgotten what happened with them. And it’s so — I mean, I remember in 2021, so many people close to me that I knew lost their lives because they couldn’t get a hospital bed because their oxygen levels dropped drastically. But now everything seems to be forgotten.

So I think first, the memory, the habit that we have forgotten that something like this happened is a challenge.

And secondly, the major challenge is the absence of any funding and collaboration between different departments, between researchers, between doctors.

The doctor that I talked to, Dr. Neetu Jain, she was telling me that she comes across patients, she also advises them and gives them some medicines and all, but she has no defined treatment structure that she can actually tell her patients.

She has no defined treatments that she can actually use to diagnose people.

Miles: That all hits with, I think, so much of what we see in our international reporting and, I mean, just everywhere.

The lack of treatments and the lack of biomarkers make it really difficult and it really hits home that [Long COVID] makes a worse impact when they’re in more marginalized communities.

Is there anything else that you would like to say from this story, from your reporting that you think we should know?

RIshabh: What I really liked about the editing processes, I remember writing this line when I said that the pandemic has ended and I think either it was Betsy or it was Miles, they, like, corrected me saying that, “See, we don’t use these words because there are people out there who are stillsuffering from Long COVID and they still have symptoms.”

And as a journalist, I’m aware of the issue, but I don’t know the medical terms, the correct terms to use, right?

And that’s where I think I lack. So when I get knowledge like this from like people like Betsy and Miles, when you tell me that, see, the pandemic has not ended … I really like that.

And secondly, is, what I also realized — I think I forgot this point while mentioning the challenges, the absence of health insurance coverage.

You go to hospital, you spend money, there is no insurance coverage for you. Sometimes you just cannot go to hospital because you don’t have money and you might just end up getting infected of the disease or, in some instances, dying also because of the disease.

The absence of insurance coverage is something, and even the insurance claim in India requires something which is — which I never understood. It requires you to be hospitalized for 24 hours.

Now imagine for a person like Sunaina or Gudia, what does it mean to be hospitalized for 24 hours?

It means that the daily wage they earn which is around USD, I would say like seven or eight, which they earn every day, they won’t be able to earn that. That’s why they don’t want to get hospitalized.

Currently, the Indian government charges 18% GST, which is the tax — 18% of GST [taxed] on a health insurance.

Who would get themselves insured if you have to pay 18% GST? After the second wave of the COVID, the insurance premium in India have risen by close to 300%.

There is a state-sponsored scheme which is called Ayushman Bharat provided by the government. Basically, you need to be below poverty line or you need to have something called a ration card on which you get free ration from the side of the government and based on, that you will get the insurance coverage.

But not everyone has the documents, not everyone has time to actually go to the department and get an Ayushman card. So that’s why most of the people in India live without an insurance. It’s very common saying that you are just one accident away from falling below the poverty line.

So I think these are some of the nuances that should literally should be looked into.

Betsy: Yeah, I mean, I appreciate it that your piece emphasizes, too, that there are really these systemic solutions that would help people with Long COVID but would also help address so many of these other inequities.

Thank you again, Rishabh, for your reporting and for taking the time to come on the podcast.

Rishabh: Thank you so much, guys.

James: You can read Rishabh’s full piece at thesicktimes.org and also find it in our transcript.

The Sick Times: The sick soft butch who did: How confronting a racist in my neighborhood helped me claim my Long COVID identity (14:28)

James: Next, we’re welcoming back engagement editor Heather Hogan onto the podcast to talk about her essay, “The Sick Soft Butch Who Did.”

It’s about a confrontation with a racist man in Queens, but it’s also about being sick and gay and not alone in both of those facts.

Heather, thanks for making time for this.

Heather Hogan: Thank you so much for having me. This is my favorite podcast.

James: [laughs] We’re glad to hear that. Like we’ve done before on previous episodes with other essays, I wanted to open it up for you to read part of the essay — dealer’s choice — for folks who haven’t gotten a chance to look at it yet.

Heather: The last thing I thought before I smashed, face first, into the New York City sidewalk, was, Dang, my wife’s going to want me to start taking my cane with me everywhere I go.

The second-to-last thing I thought, naturally, was, Oh god, my mouth is going to touch this disgusting pavement where every dog in the neighborhood contends in the Astoria Pee Wars.

But mostly, I was worried one of my neighbors would watch me tumble over and go limp. My backasswards hope, as my knees collided with the asphalt, was that witnesses would think I was drunk, even though I haven’t had a sip of alcohol in years. Maybe anyone standing nearby could write me off as sozzled or clumsy, rather than thinking I was sick or weak. Or any of the other descriptors I’ve spent the last five years internally combating: delicate, feeble, frail. 

I have Long COVID-induced postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a form of dysautonomia, so I’m no stranger to fainting; I just usually do it inside my house, onto a clean floor, and wake up with my cat guarding me. 

This was my first time going down out in the wild, and, by far, my grisliest fall. Before I even sat up, I could tell I had road rash running from my chin to my cheek, a sprained shoulder, and that all the skin was ripped off my knees. My jeans were already soaked with blood. My jaw smacked the pavement so hard I was afraid it was broken. And my nose, too. They’d somehow hit the sidewalk separately and made completely different comic book noises: WHAM! And then: THWACK! 

But, no. I wasn’t in a comic book and I certainly wasn’t a hero.

I grew up idolizing Batman, pledging at the end of every episode to fight bad guys and make the world a little bit safer for people who couldn’t defeat evil-doers by themselves. 

But Long COVID took so much from me, including that ever-burning childhood dream. I never expected to reclaim it, and certainly not by letting people watch me fall and bleed. But that’s what happened. Not on this nose-dive, but the next — thanks to one single bigot walking around New York City in one of those devil-red Make America Great Again baseball caps. 

Miles: Alright, so Heather, you’re obviously our engagement editor. What made you want to pitch the second time and write this piece?

Heather: Yeah, I think I have the most fun job out of all of our jobs because I get to interact with so many of our readers and I get to see them sharing so many of their stories. And the more that I continued to work and promote other people’s essays, the more I felt this great sense of camaraderie, specifically with the community.

And it felt like when you’re all sort of sitting around and you’re sharing your stories, I just wanted to be part of that conversation, specifically with The Sick Times audience, because I feel really close to them.

Betsy: One thing that is so meaningful about the piece is how you sort of reflect on your identity as a butch lesbian, which is something I connected to as one myself.

I don’t have Long COVID though, so it’s a bit different for me, but like — the sense of, you want to be someone who is really strong, who is really reliable, and, like, what that means when suddenly this disease kind of takes that away from you.

What was it like to write about that or to reflect on that in this piece?

Heather: That’s a great question. And it has evolved so much. In the very beginning of the pandemic, maybe late 2020, early 2021, I wrote an essay about being a soft butch with Long COVID. And at that point in my life, I really sort of felt like I had lost myself.

In my early days of being sick, it was really sort of the only time I really cried about it. And I’m not a big crier.

And the thing I just continued to say to my wife was like, “I’ve lost my health, I’ve lost myself.” And I felt in losing my physical strength, in losing my sense of almost invincibility, I lost sort of the way that people looked at me.

I am very visibly stereotypically gay, and I moved through the world as a butch lesbian. When I’m out in public, people often ask me for help for things, for getting stuff off the top shelf or help finding something at Home Depot —

Betsy: Also, Heather is pretty tall. I feel like that’s important for people to know for those who haven’t met her in person [laughs]. The stature is there.

Heather: [laughs] Aw, Betsy! I’m 5’10 and you would not miss me if you saw me at a grocery store.

Like I’m big, I move through the world in like, a butchy way.

So I felt like I had become very weak [in my early days of Long COVID]. I felt weak physically. I felt undependable.

I felt sick and feeble and I didn’t want to have to use a mobility aid and I didn’t want to fall over all the time.

I — really, writing this essay was sort of learning to grapple with the fact that, no, I’m not exactly strong in the ways that I used to be strong. But I’m still the exact same person that I was and I am strong in other ways that maybe I didn’t recognize before or ways that I’ve become strong since I’ve gotten sick.

You know, one of the reasons that I love being a butch lesbian is that I feel like it connects me with this really deep and rich and beautiful strong past of other women who are like me.

And in losing my strength, I felt like I lost that connection.

But in this confrontation I had with this man, I actually realized something that was so silly that I hadn’t before, which is: Now I’m just part of a larger community of disabled queer women who have gone before me, disabled queer people that have come before me.

There’s so many, there’s so many of our most celebrated elders and so many queer scholars that are also disabled.

And laying on the ground in a pile of bananas, I finally started to really understand that.

James: To your point about like finding community, I’ve thought a lot about this a lot too because the pandemic has been kind of the catalyst for me realizing like, oh, I’m a femme lesbian. And obviously, like, it’s just been a lot to navigate what it looks like to find that specific niche of community in a time when it’s so much more inaccessible.

You know, you spoke to how, in writing this essay, you kind of came to the realization that you have access to a larger community than maybe you realized you had before.

And so I’m curious about how, you know, Long COVID and coming to terms with Long COVID has impacted being part of queer community, lesbian community, and maybe conversely, how, you know, being a butch lesbian has also connected you to the disability community.

Heather: Yeah, that’s another fantastic question, and I think so much of my own growth in marrying my butch lesbian identity with my disabled identity has come from working at The Sick Times.

It has opened up my own eyes into areas where I had a lot of internalized ableism, you know, interacting with our readers and hearing their stories has opened up my perspective on strength.

You know, I know one of the things that a lot of disabled people feel is they don’t want to have to be called strong. They don’t want to be have to be called brave, like, I just want to live my life.

I’ve valued bravery and strength so much my whole life. They’ve been so important to me and so integral to my identity that finding those different areas of strength and bravery inside the community and the disabled community and in the queer community through my time at The Sick Times has been absolutely world-changing to me.

Every time we publish something and every time that I push it out on social media, all the responses that we get back, it just opens up my mind and my world in ways that I never would have expected, in ways I’m so grateful for.

It feels — it feels like the opposite of being alone, which is what I felt for a very, very long time when, when I first got sick.

Miles: All of us are tearing up a little bit.

Is there anything else you would like to say about sort of this experience or the writing of this essay?

Heather: I’ve been writing professionally almost 20 years, and I think this was the most scared I’ve ever been to write something and publish it, because I feel like it addressed so many vulnerabilities in the so many intersecting ways that I hadn’t maybe necessarily shared all together before.

When I talk about Long COVID I want to do right by the community, and I want to represent the people with ME [myalgic encephalomyelitis] who came before us, who have been holding it down for so long.

You know, the response so far to my essay has been that people saying that they both laughed and cried, and I think I told you guys when I pitched the essay, that’s what I wanted.

I want people to be able to laugh and I want them to be able to, like, experience like a deep emotion as well.

And it’s really important for me to be able to laugh at myself.

And I just hope it comes through that I’m not like laughing about POTS or fainting — you know, I’m laying on the ground and I’m just thinking how many dogs have peed on this ground.

So it’s just important for me to be able to find the humor and I’m so grateful that you allowed me to explore that and to publish that here.

So thank you so much.

Miles: Thank you so much, Heather. It has been so great working with you on this essay.

James: You can find a link to Heather’s full essay on our website and it’s of course linked in our transcript.

Next, we’ll go to a research update.

Research (24:18)

[Miles’ voice echoes the word “Research” accompanied with a sound excerpted from the theme song]

Miles: Yes. So for research this week, we put together sort of a special — there was a big conference called the Conference for Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, also called CROI. It was held earlier this month in San Francisco.

The conference is focused on HIV research, but in recent years has included several papers on Long COVID and COVID-19.

This year, there were a lot of Long COVID papers — there were at least 24 and at least 37 on COVID-19, so we picked some of the, you know, bigger summaries from this conference.

The first was from a large electronic cohort study via RECOVER researchers, [which] found an increased risk of Long COVID in people living with HIV. We’ve seen a bunch of studies on this in the past. So this is just a much larger cohort.

The study evaluated two cohorts totaling over 30,000 people with HIV and over 3 million people without HIV. Authors wrote that the study “highlights challenges and possible disparities in recognizing and diagnosing Long COVID.”

The study just adds further evidence to an increased risk of Long COVID in people with HIV. We reported this on a little bit in 2023 kind of calling to attention that, you know, we’ve known this for quite a few years now. We’ve seen studies emerging, but still there’s kind of very little recognition of Long COVID within the larger HIV community, especially from organizations. There’s just not a lot of messaging still, even two years later.

And this is very important because this is something that is affecting a lot of people.

Betsy: Another study that was presented at the conference was the results of a clinical trial for an oral antiviral for COVID-19 called Ensitrelvir.

So this was a double-blinded trial with over 2,000 participants. Double-blinded means that neither the people participating nor the people administering the study knew who was getting the drug and who was getting a placebo, so it’s a relatively high standard for clinical trials.

And the study found that among people who were exposed to COVID, the antiviral reduced the chance of developing the disease by 67%.

So considering, you know, our current vaccines and treatments don’t do a lot to reduce risk of COVID infection, they only reduce risk of severe disease, that’s pretty good news and would potentially add a lot to our existing options for anti-COVID pharmaceuticals.

Of course, this is just preliminary results presented at a conference. Usually studies that are presented at scientific meetings like this are preliminary — they’ve not necessarily gone through a peer review yet. It’s just an opportunity for scientists to share their findings with each other and with the media, with the public.

So we will really look forward to continuing to follow this drug and some of the other areas of research from this conference.

Miles: Yeah, I found it super uplifting as well to see that so much attention was being put into Long COVID and COVID. And from such incredible researchers, I mean, this conference also had really big findings that are advancing HIV.

There was a lot of good news at the conference and then there was also a lot of bad news with the funding to international organizations and research, which we will have a freelancer reporting on in the coming weeks.

James: As much as a mixed bag as it has been, I think it also is important to recognize that the fact that this is happening at a conference where — the conference is geared around people living with HIV, they are also recognizing that this is deeply connected with COVID, with Long COVID as well.

Outro (28:05)

James: But yeah, on that note, that’s all we have for you this week.

Again, to contribute to our five-year retrospective pandemic episode, you can visit tinyurl.com/tst5yearspod.

That link will be in our transcript and we’ll be sharing it out in our newsletter and our other social media platforms.

So plenty of ways to be reminded of that over the next few weeks. You can stay up to date with The Sick Times newsletter and coverage at thesicktimes.org or on our social media.

[Instrumental theme song excerpt plays underneath the rest of the podcast]

Miles: We’ll continue reporting the information you need to better practice care.

Betsy: Solidarity with everyone still here. 

James: This podcast and The Sick Times are supported by you. You can help us keep this work going by donating on our website.

Still Here is a production of The Sick Times, a nonprofit newsroom chronicling the ongoing Long COVID crisis. 

Our theme song for this episode is the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s rendition of Which Side Are You On?, originally by Florence Reece. I’m James Salanga and I produced this episode. Our engagement editor is Heather Hogan and Sophie Dimitriou designed our podcast cover art. And Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets are your co-hosts and The Sick Times’ co-founders.

Thanks for listening.