Long COVID and Society

This edited book focuses on the social aspects and impacts of Long COVID from an international perspective, including contributions from researchers in the UK, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands. USA and Australia. The book highlights how Long COVID affects people’s identities, social relationships, life opportunities and inclusion in society. Long COVID, like COVID itself, is a social and political as well as a medical phenomenon. People with Long COVID, from young children to older adults, are confronting ableism, social stigma, exclusion, invisibility and gaslighting. The book throws a spotlight on the struggles over the legitimacy of lay expertise versus medical authority and addresses how people with Long COVID are supporting and learning from each other and engaging in activism and advocacy initiatives. Crucially, most of the authors are themselves living with or caring for someone with Long COVID or work closely with Long COVID patient communities and others with lived experience. Chapters 1 and 14 are available as Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.