As Hantavirus and Ebola Cases Rise, Long COVID Is Being Forgotten

A pile of disposable blue respiratory face masks. — Image Credit: Andrej Lišakov For Unsplash+

It was when a self-described science podcaster used the phrase “post-COVID” in a social media graphic that I had to speak up. I don’t normally comment on businesses’ or strangers’ posts, but the use of such a biased, unscientific phrase motivated me to post a comment in protest.

“Post-COVID” is a woefully inaccurate term. While, in the current moment, we are no longer at the peak of COVID—often defined as extreme waves of deaths and hospitalizations—we do not and will never live in a “post-COVID” world. People are still being impacted by this disease, including becoming permanently disabled and contracting new cases.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 12,284 new cases of SARS-CoV-2 from April 6 to May 3, 2026. In the previous 28-day period, 27,615 new cases were reported. According to WHO, five countries in the Americas, Europe, and Southeast Asia all had increases in new cases greater than 10 percent.

We do not and will never live in a “post-COVID” world.

In addition to COVID, we live in a world facing increasing rates of multiple infectious diseases mutating, in large part due to climate change and habitat loss, and diseases stretching into new areas where they had previously been unreported.

The latest examples of this are the Andes strain of hantavirus, with a cluster of cases coming from a Dutch-flagged cruise ship in May, and Ebola, with new cases confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a rapidly escalating outbreak.

News of both viruses raced through social media, with many posts fear-mongering or spreading inaccurate information. Repeatedly, I read the phrase “I can’t do another pandemic,” implying the poster could not bear to get vaccines, stay inside, socially distance, or wear a mask.

For those of us living with Long COVID, such comments are beyond frustrating. The reason we have post-COVID syndrome is because not enough people cared to do a pandemic and follow medical guidance the first time around, including getting vaccinated and boosted and wearing masks—community care our community should still be doing.

Even as other viruses that pose less of a threat to the public in the United States have spikes in cases, COVID is still with us and continues to be a mass-disabling event. Ignoring or minimizing COVID contributes to delays in diagnosis or care and causes the mental health of people living with Long COVID to suffer. It also does not prepare us for facing newly emerging or more widely spreading diseases.

“I Am Still Not the Same As I Was”

I’m one of the about 18 million people worldwide diagnosed with Long COVID. It is estimated that the real number of people with Long COVID is actually much higher, but many people have not been officially diagnosed, either due to not understanding or refusing to believe their symptoms, or because they don’t have access to care.

I was diagnosed with Long COVID following one COVID infection in February 2023.

That’s similar to the experience of Luke (who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity) in Minnesota. Luke was a college student at his “dream school” when he contracted COVID as a sophomore. Eventually, the illness, which included sudden joint pain so severe he couldn’t stand up for longer than a minute, forced him to drop out of school and move home.

“The first doctor I spoke with diagnosed me with post-viral arthritis as a result of my COVID-19 infection, and I struggled to believe that the mild virus that cleared up weeks ago could be doing this to me,” Luke said in an interview with NPQ.

Other Long COVID symptoms he experienced included extreme fatigue, so much he was sleeping 12 hours a day without a dent in his exhaustion, and brain fog that impacted his ability to speak coherently.

My own symptoms have also been fatigue and cognitive issues, including a daily headache that lasted three years before I was given an additional diagnosis of neural inflammation and put on a treatment plan. Luke and I are fortunate in that we both happen to live near two of the last remaining medical clinics devoted to the research and treatment of Long COVID. But these clinics are disappearing every day, due to funding cuts.

As Luke said, “I am still not the same as I was before Long COVID, and I may never be. I am hopeful that more treatment options will emerge down the line with further research, but as of right now, Long COVID has sidetracked my life, and been permanently disabling to me and many others.”

“Most People Stopped Caring”

For those still very much living in the reality of COVID and the long-term aftermath of even one infection, news of spiking cases of hantavirus and Ebola have been received with resignation. It is not easy to trust that people will do the right thing when it comes to community care.

Writer Stephanie King said in an interview with NPQ: “I have zero confidence that people will take appropriate precautions against hantavirus because COVID has shown that we don’t really believe in public health anymore.”

“Most people stopped caring about COVID the moment they decided, accurately or not, that it was not a danger to their personal health.”

King hasn’t been diagnosed with Long COVID, but she does have recurring shingles infections after getting COVID while she was running a GED program in North Philadelphia, PA. Even a single COVID infection has been linked to new health problems developing after recovery. These can include, according to Harvard Health, “heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, inflammation…and blood clots that traveled to [patients’] lungs.”

As Luke told NPQ, “First and foremost, I’m horrified that public health has been so thoroughly politicized in America that it’s affecting the safety of the rest of the world. The cuts to USAID have already cost lives, and I fear that many Americans won’t realize what’s been lost until the consequences reach their doorstep.”

When it comes to the public response, Luke said, “I’m not surprised that hantavirus and Ebola are causing panic while COVID goes ignored. Cynically, I believe that people care more about these novel threats because they still think it might affect them. To my eye, most people stopped caring about COVID the moment they decided, accurately or not, that it was not a danger to their personal health. Even for those who took COVID seriously to begin with, once vaccines were available, lockdowns had ended, hospitals were no longer overwhelmed by the dead and dying, and the CDC rolled back its recommendations, COVID was out of sight and out of mind.”

Because there is a COVID vaccine, people may view COVID as less of a threat, though even one mild infection can cause Long COVID, with repeated infections increasing the risk, or can lead to other health problems previously unseen in a patient. There is no vaccine yet for hantavirus or Ebola, whose mortality rates are both higher than COVID. Neither is there established treatment for either, beyond comfort or palliative care.

Luke also pointed out that “neither have had widespread outbreaks in the United States, so they remain an unknown threat rather than one like COVID or even measles, which are perceived as an already dealt with thing of the past.”

“People seem almost as afraid of the threat of another lockdown as they are of the diseases themselves.”

This despite measles’ resurgence in the United States where there have been 3,564 confirmed cases in 46 states since 2025 alone, mostly striking children and teens. In a piece published in March of this year, Harvard Health characterized measles as “making a comeback.”

But people want to forget about measles as they want to forget COVID. Not only are we not keeping new cases and those impacted by Long COVID in mind, we are not putting the lessons of the COVID pandemic into practice, such as masking.

Taking appropriate precautions to protect her own health and that of her community while in public spaces, has led King to feel like, as she described it: “The Last Person Masking.”

As Luke said, “In the discussions I’ve seen around hantavirus and Ebola, people seem almost as afraid of the threat of another lockdown as they are of the diseases themselves. Rather than increasing awareness of disease control and prevention, COVID seems to have fostered an aversion to any personal inconvenience caused by public health measures.”

It’s Never Too Late

Such an aversion not only impacts the mental health of the millions living with Long COVID, a disease which already can lead to worsening mental health outcomes, it could deter people with symptoms from seeking treatment—or even getting a diagnosis at all.

That’s already hard to do; in March 2026, only 26 clinics nationwide responded to an inquiry from The Sick Times affirming that they still offered Long COVID care. That’s down from 400 clinics offering such care in 2022. This rapidly shrinking number of Long COVID clinics, unequally distributed across the United States, with zero care facilities in rural areas, is despite the fact that the number of people with Long COVID is only growing.

Long COVID is an extremely isolating disability. It can be invisible. No one can see my headaches. It’s inconsistent—I have some energy one day, but definitely not the next. And it alienates a person when they don’t feel safe to be in the world, even among friends if those friends don’t take illness prevention seriously.

“I’m lucky enough to live in an area with an active COVID-safe social scene, but before I got plugged into that, I felt kind of crazy watching the whole world return to normal as though nothing had ever happened,” Luke said. “It felt like the million people who died of COVID in the US alone and the million more who were disabled by it had suddenly disappeared from collective memory.”

Luke continued, “Even during lockdown, it was pretty common to hear people say that only old and disabled people were dying. I can’t un-know how many people see those lives as worthless. I can’t stop seeing the refusal to wear a mask as an extension of that attitude.”

The best defense against illness is preventative: to get regular and updated vaccines, including for COVID and flu. To avoid areas where a virus is spreading. To take the precautions dictated by community health professionals. And to mask in public.

“It’s never too late to start wearing a mask again!” Luke said. “I think many otherwise caring people have stopped masking from a combination of social pressure and believing it’s pointless, either because they think the pandemic is over, or because they think it won’t make a difference if they’re the only one doing it. I can’t deny that masking can be socially ostracizing at times, but it is not pointless, the COVID pandemic is not over, and you, your loved ones, and your neighbors deserve to be protected from unnecessary illness.”