Remember that time we had a global pandemic?

(note, it’s not just people with pre-existing illness that get Long Covid, everyone is at risk, including high performance athletes)

It’s not news, people having been getting Long Covid since 2020. Before the pandemic, post-viral syndromes were known about and understood to varying degrees: M.E. (not caused by a single virus) and post-polio syndrome being two obvious ones. What’s remarkable about Long Covid is the extent of the denial that it’s a major issues for humans.

There’s a fair amount of evidence to suggest that there are still many things to learn about the covid infection itself, but it’s been clear for some time now that it can and does wreak ongoing havoc in the bodies of a significant portion of the population.

Important to understand here is that repeat infections appear to increase the risk of Long Covid in an individual. It’s not rocket engineering to realise that over time an exponential number of people will have Long Covid. Apparently less easy to take on board is how that will impact on human society and its ability to function. What % of people with brain fog, fatigue, immune dysregulation, auto-immune conditions, and ongoing medical needs, will it take for critical aspects of society to be disrupted? Myself, I think we are already seeing obvious lower level signs in the number of workplaces are are now perpetually understaffed. I’m not imagining it,

That’s loss of productivity, but also increasing health and welfare costs, as well as an increase in household debt and poverty.

Covid and Long Covid are part of the polycrisis, the great convergence of the climate and ecological crises, the rise of authoritarianism, and the fracturing of the global economy. LC reminds me of climate consciousness in a lot of ways, particularly how we ignore it at our peril even as we acknowledge its existence.

It didn’t have to be this way. In the same way we could have used the global economy to drop GHGs any time in the past 4 decades, we could have transitioned in the past five years from the acute phase of the pandemic to one that treated infection seriously by adapting how we run society. For instance we have the technology to monitor and ventilate/filter/purify air in shared spaces like schools, hospitals, event centres, cafes and so on. Why was this not done on a war footing type level?

Beyond that, adapting our expectations and behaviour is key to solving the polycrisis. We want the climate solution to be BAU green replacement, but we are well beyond that working. Now we can change how we live now and create different societies with distinct limits but still living good lives, or we can carry on, business as usual and ignoring the impending tidal wave, and wait for the climate to collapse and being forced to change in the most terrible of ways.

Mostly I think the polycrisis is too large for humans to get their brains around. We can know something is real but still not be able to cognitively cope with that reality. We are currently clinging to the leaky life raft instead of swimming for the shore. The longer we leave it, the harder it gets.

In case this is all too depressing, I still have hope in human ingenuity, and the large networks across the whole planet who have been working on transition for a long time. Every community in New Zealand now has multiple people and organisations working on reducing GHGs, and increasing resiliency. Those groups need to get on board with Long Covid and integrate mitigation processes into their work, or they too will find themselves in the losing end of the battle.

Ending on a proactive note, all the solutions to the polycrisis I see that make sense are based in systems thinking and working with the relationships between the things in systems. As an example, in 2021 I wrote about pairing covid response and climate action. Wellington City Council were trying to address issues of covid restrictions affecting the hospitality sector.

On the debate about Delta Level Two and ongoing restrictions affecting the hospitality sector. Eighteen months into our covid repsonse, it’s time we started adapting for the long haul. We need to create sectors that can not only survive this pandemic, but the next and the other synchronous crisis, instead of hanging on for some mythical return to normal. One of the keys to that is positive adaptation.

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Here it’s pairing covid response with the much needed climate action shift away from personal car use. Add tree planting to that vision and the multiple benefits include increased biodiversity, micro climate cooling, and increased well-being from having nature in our immediate environment. Now is also the time to be planning a lot more outside green spaces, everywhere, and rethinking cities as infilled and crowded.

So, Wellington City Council, have the meeting with hospo people about covid, but make sure that the rewilding, permaculture, and car-free movement bods are in the same room.