Long Voldemort

The Disease That Shall Not Be Named

It has become clear for a while now that various social media companies are flagging and suppressing posts containing certain phrases, such as “Covid” and now “H5N1.”

And so, in a bit of meta-commentary, I have started referring to Long Covid as Long Voldemort, both in the hopes it can slip through the confines of the algorithm, and also because, like Voldemort, the reality of Long Covid is something we’ve decided doesn’t exist if we stop naming it.

But alas, it still exists.

I have always had a knack for developing the wrong diseases, meaning, diseases that cost the wrong people money. Lyme Disease, for example, is easy to treat in its acute stage, but very expensive to treat when it’s serious. So insurance companies, working together with the CDC, declared that it basically never gets to that serious stage after initial treatment — because if it did (it does!), they’d be bankrupt, paying for all those PICC lines and IV antibiotics and long-term disability policies.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it — Upton Sinclair

Upon this concept, the entire edifice of denial about Long Covid rests. If Long Covid really is serious, disabling, and common, then a whole lot of rich people are going to lose their money. Airline companies — nobody will want to travel. Oil companies — ditto. Insurance companies, long term care companies. Our entire Medicare and Social Security infrastructure will also be at risk, which is not nothing. They did not budget for a mass disabling event.

If Long Covid is truly disabling, then of course hospitals should pay workman’s comp for it - and how will they pay for that, by the thousands? And patients should be able to sue for damages if they get it at the hospital — and who’s going to pay for that? And all hospitals will need to be retrofitted with state-of-the-art air filtration management — and who’s going to pay for that?

So; “Long Covid doesn’t exist.”

But of course, it does exist, and the problem is increasing exponentially, thus it will soon become (sadly) impossible to ignore.

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The risk of the worst case of Long Voldemort — a disabling, bedbound case of Long Voldemort — appears to be about .4%, or 4 infections out of every 1,000 infections. Not so bad, right?

There is a formula for this. You start by figuring out how likely it is that you will emerge unscathed. Your chance of getting through a single Voldemort without Long Voldemort is .996! That's pretty good, right? Safe as houses!

Each subsequent Voldemort, your total chance of remaining unscathed is .996 raised to the power of (# of voldemorts) or .996^voldemort, where voldemort = number of infections.¹

Assuming one infection per year, beginning in 2020, by 2030 your individual risk of being so disabled that you can no longer work, drive, or take care of yourself skyrockets to a total lifetime risk of FOUR PERCENT.

Four percent may not sound like a big number, but spread across all of society it is massive.

There is a lot of variability in infection rates - some folks rarely get it, others get it all the time -- so let's make two very generous assumptions that underestimate the general risk:

1. Let’s assume risk is like the roll of a die, rather than cumulative

2. Let’s assume only 60% of people get it once a year, and everyone else never gets it at all.

330M people x 60% = 198M people

198M people x .4% = 7.92M people

How well do we think society is going to function with 8 million severely disabled people in the near future?

Meanwhile, as this hellish scenario starts building, the messaging about Long Voldemort will progress as follows:

Stage 1: There is no Long Voldemort

Stage 2: Well, some people have lingering...problems...but also, do they *really*? Maybe they're just lazy or mentally ill.

Stage 3: Ok, *some* people Do have Long Voldemort, but only INFERIOR people. YOU'LL never get Long Voldemort, because you're SUPERIOR. ← we are here

This works especially well to quell discussion, as anyone who thinks of themself as a "good" person will keep their Long Voldemort symptoms private! Tricking people into thinking that their sickness is a sign of personal failure will send many people spiraling down the path of shame and secrecy. These people will be then be too ashamed to demand acknowledgement and treatment…for a while at least.

At some point though, in the future, some sort of treatment will probably be found. I suspect it will be an anti-viral cocktail not dissimilar to the treatments for HIV. It will keep the chronic infection in check, but never cured — at great profit.

Lead to the sudden about-face of...

Stage 4: Oh, has anything ever been so life-shattering as Long Voldemort? Pity the poor sufferer! Look, this person can barely get out of bed! That person can no longer work! Oh, the humanity! But for the low, low cost of $10,000 a month, a treatment can be yours! And how can you possibly demand a discount on treatment? Will nobody think of the true victims in such a scenario - Our Stockholders!

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So, this is the scenario we face. We do need to fight for recognition of Long Voldemort, aka Long Covid. But we also need to understand that every step of that will be a battle, because every step will be asking somebody, somewhere to be slightly less rich.

Be strategic and plan accordingly.

1. If someone knows how to do superscript in Substack, please let me know. I am irked that I cannot make my exponential voldemort look right.