Long Covid – The Medical Afterlife of the Pandemic

Kurzfassung/Abstract

The paper investigates temporality in Long COVID patients’ and health care professionals’ narratives. It is based on ethnographic research that follows Grounded Theory Methodology and, in more detail, is based on narrative interviews and observations of patient-physician interactions.
The material shows that Long COVID patients recall that, at the beginning of their disease, they expected that they would heal gradually and that there would be a time in the future when they are going to recover entirely. Physicians also embed "the Long Covid experience" in the patient’s general medical history and thus the patient's biography rather than offering "a special Long Covid treatment".
The paper thus draws on the tension between the hope of an end of Long COVID on the one hand and the actual temporal experience of healing or living with a chronic illness on the other hand. It concludes with the preliminary finding that the notion of what Long Covid is (a biomedical condition? Shortage of breath? Fatigue? General long term consequences of the pandemic and the lockdowns? A psychiatric condition? etc.) determines the patients' and the physicians' trajectory.