Long Covid is one of the unsolved mysteries of the pandemic. It is not clear how common it really is, who is most likely to suffer from it, or how it should be treated. What is known is that some people continue to experience some of the symptoms of the disease even weeks, or months, after recovering from Covid 19. And that in some cases, the disorders can prove debilitating. Violet Affleck, eldest daughter of Ben Affleck and actress Jennifer Garner, recently recalled this when she spoke about her battle with an unspecified post-viral syndrome during a public meeting of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on July 9, to demonstrate her opposition to the ban on masks during demonstrations and marches, proposed in recent weeks by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
Violet Affleck: “To confront the Long COVID crisis I demand mask availability, air filtration and far-UVC light in government facilities, including jails and detention centers and mask mandates in county medical facilities. We must expand availability of tests and treatment.… pic.twitter.com/zg4b7Z9vxy
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) July 10, 2024
The idea of banning the use of masks during political public gatherings has actually been put forward in other American cities such as New York, and is linked to the growing climate of violence in the country due to protests against the war in Gaza. In Los Angeles, for example, in recent weeks a pro-Palestine demonstration organized in front of a synagogue in the western part of the city degenerated into a clash between protesters and supporters of Israel. With mutual accusations of having started the violence, a circumstance that is difficult to confirm also due to the widespread use of masks among protesters, which complicates their identification by the authorities.
While on the one hand, therefore, the proposal to ban the use of masks is linked solely to reasons of public order (as is the case in our country, where there is a ban on walking around with your face covered without a good reason), it has nevertheless raised a lot of controversy not only from students and political activists involved in the protests, but also from a segment of public opinion that still believes the use of masks is imperative to slow the spread of Sars-Cov-2.
Among them is Violet Affleck, 18, who, speaking publicly on July 9 before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said that she had suffered firsthand from a post-viral syndrome in 2019 (from which she has now recovered), and that she had thus seen firsthand the dangers that even trivial infections can entail. “The Covid 19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated this,” she said during the public hearing, “one in 10 infections causes long Covid, which is a devastating neurological and cardiovascular disease, which can prevent people from working, moving, seeing and even thinking, and which is destined to worsen the current homelessness crisis and the suffering of so many people in our city.”
It is not clear which virus caused the disorder complained of by Violet Affleck, given that in 2019 Covid had not yet arrived in the United States. However, post-viral syndromes can be caused by many viruses, including influenza. The symptoms are very varied, and include fatigue, difficulty breathing, muscle and joint pain, headaches, concentration and memory problems and many other disorders, which still appear (or arise from scratch) at least three months after the infection. In the case of Covid 19, according to the WHO it can affect between 10 and 20% of patients (similar in incidence to that documented for the flu), a percentage that is however probably inflated by the difficulty that health authorities have in identifying asymptomatic or pauci-symptomatic cases, and by the fact that compared to the early stages of the pandemic today a much larger portion of the population has already contracted the virus in the past and has had one or more vaccinations.