The Scourge of 'Medium Covid'

You thought you were going to die from Covid. Then you feared Long Covid. But it turns out that Medium Covid could be the most dangerous Covid of all, according to fright bat Dr Benjamin Mazer over at The Atlantic.

The good doctor begins …

I am still afraid of catching COVID.

Wait. What? You haven’t had it yet? Are you SURE you’ve been vaccinated?

As a young, healthy, bivalently boosted physician, I no longer worry that I’ll end up strapped to a ventilator, but it does seem plausible that even a mild case of the disease could shorten my life, or leave me with chronic fatigue, breathing trouble, and brain fog.

I think the brain fog has already taken hold of this young, healthy, boosted up the wazoo doctor.

What does it say about the vaccine that you are bivalently boosted, no less, and still petrified of the flu? Sheesh. You’re not exactly selling the vax doc!

Roughly one in 10 Americans appears to share my concern, including plenty of doctors.

That’s pretty amazing since way fewer than one in 10 Americans read the Atlantic. But I digress.

Recently, I’ve begun to think that our worries might be better placed.

No kidding.

There’s skyrocketing power prices, there’s the war in Europe, there’s the white anting of Western civilisation from within, there’s a billion people still without access to electricity, there’s the North Melbourne coaching situation ….

Some people’s lives are devastated by long COVID. For the majority of vaccinated people, however, the worst complications will … emerge during the middle phase of post-infection. This period of time is so menacing, in fact, that it really ought to have its own, familiar name: medium COVID.

Oh wow. You’re still doing the Covid thing.

Alrighty then. I have to say, you’re more determined than a spike protein trying to evade security at a Wuhan lab.

Just how much of a threat is medium COVID?

I’m assuming this is a rhetorical question?

I’ll answer anyway.

It’s NOT a threat, apart from to young, healthy, bivalently boosted physicians needing to write a column for the Atlantic, but with nothing to say.

The answer has been obscured, to some extent, by sloppy definitions.

The doc who just invented “medium Covid” laments medial exactitude being obscured by sloppy definitions!

The pervasiveness of medium COVID does nothing to negate the reality of long COVID

That’s good because I was starting to think you were denying the existence of people with long Covid.

Also, my preferred pronouns are vaxxed/boosted.

But if you’re like me, and trying to calibrate your behaviors to meet some personally acceptable level of COVID risk, then it helps to keep in mind the difference between the virus’s medium- and long-term complications. 

Honestly, apart from ABC commentator Jane Caro and former AMA President Dr Kerryn Phelps, I don’t think anyone is like you.

For millions of people, medium COVID is as bad as it gets.

On the contrary, I’d say being a young, healthy, bivalently boosted physician living in fear of a disease for which there is a 99 per cent recovery rate is as bad as it gets.

I’m honestly not sure why I subscribe to The Atlantic.

Just on that, if you’re going to subscribe to any magazine, The Spectator is easily my favourite. I write for them, but I’m also a subscriber. It’s the best selection of articles you’ll get day in/day out bar yours truly (of course)

You can subscribe to The Spectator here