The Future of Long COVID

This book provides an overview of Long COVID, the chronic illness and disability that can result from COVID-19 infection in 20–30% of survivors. It approaches the topic through its larger social, political, and historical context utilizing the Threatcasting methodology for scenario-based foresight. The book brings together multiple perspectives on Long COVID, such as patient experiences, healthcare system impacts, historical frameworks, and the information ecosystem surrounding COVID to explore the long-term structural implications of Long COVID beyond the current acute crisis. It is intended to be a guide for policy makers, healthcare providers, researchers, and anyone whose work will play a role in mitigating the long tail of COVID-19. Framing the pandemic within a historical and political framework while approaching Long COVID from the future-casting perspective, this book seeks to disentangle the issues posed by Long COVID from the current moment and is intended to establish newways of thinking about and preparing for similar complex, over-the-horizon potential threats.

• The first book to apply the Threatcasting framework to a public-health issue like COVID-19
• Draws together multiple perspectives of Long COVID that were previously discussed independently within their fields
• Comprehensively examines the history and future of Long COVID

Melissa Smallwood (M.S. 2021, M.A. 2016) is a Science and Technology Policy researcher with a background in neuroscience, psychology, social science, and disability studies. She is interested in how disability and healthcare justice issues intersect with emerging technologies, political trends, and dominant paradigms in medicine and academia. Prior to the global disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, Smallwood was interested in the tensions between patient advocate groups and the medical establishment—a subject with which many more people are now being forced to grapple.

Smallwood was introduced to the Threatcasting methodology through Brian David Johnson’s lab at Arizona State University, where she worked with a group to forecast a range of potential outcomes of COVID-19 and to apply the lessons of the pandemic to anticipatory policy-making moving forward. She decided to use this approach to specifically look at Long COVID—an under-reported public health issue with massive societal implications. The findings of this project form the basis for Smallwood’s debut book, The Future of Long COVID. Smallwood currently works with software that supports the development of emerging technologies, as well as being an independent researcher and activist focused on Long COVID, COVID mitigation, and other justice issues highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.