“I feel this pressure of jumping into the Pacific and not knowing if I can survive or not.” But right now, “it’s like asking someone who cannot swim to jump into the ocean instead of trying a pool,” Vivian Cheung, a biologist at the University of Michigan who has a genetic autoimmune disorder, told me. “I know very few people who are immunocompromised and get to live in a bubble,” says Maggie Levantovskaya, a writer and literature professor who has lupus, an autoimmune disorder that can cause debilitating inflammation across the entire body.Īs the coronavirus moves from a furious boil to a gentle simmer, many immunocompromised people (like everyone else) hope to slowly expand their life again. Contrary to popular misconceptions, most immunocompromised people are neither visibly sick nor secluded. “How am I supposed to provide for my family or live my life if there’s a pandemic raging?” he said. “How’s that supposed to work?” He is an emergency doctor at Northwestern Medicine he can neither work from home nor protect himself by avoiding public spaces. From the very start of the pandemic, some commentators have floated the idea “that we can protect the vulnerable and everyone else can go on with their lives,” Seth Trueger, who is on immunosuppressants for an autoimmune complication of cancer, told me. In the past, immunocompromised people lived with their higher risk of infection, but COVID represents a new threat that, for many, has further jeopardized their ability to be part of the world. That makes at least 7 million immunocompromised people-a number that’s already larger than the populations of 36 states, without even including the millions more who have diseases that also hamper immunity, such as AIDS and at least 450 genetic disorders. adults take immunosuppressive drugs, either to treat cancers or autoimmune disorders or to stop their body from rejecting transplanted organs or stem cells. That means policies that protected Landon and other immunocompromised people, including mask mandates and vaccination requirements, are disappearing, while accommodations that benefited them, such as flexible working options, are being rolled back. Much of the United States dropped COVID restrictions long ago many more cities and states are now following. A significant proportion of them don’t respond to COVID vaccines, so despite being vaccinated, many are still unsure whether they’re actually protected- and some know that they aren’t. Two years later, COVID-19 is still all around us, everywhere, and millions of people like Landon are walking around with a compromised immune system. “And I realized, Oh my God, I could die,” she said. One night, she found that in the fog of an earlier day, she had written on her to-do list: Make a will. And she knew exactly what was happening to people who got infected. “We didn’t have enough tests, it was probably around us everywhere, and I’m walking around every day with insufficient antibodies and hamstrung T-cells,” she told me. Normally, she’d be confident about avoiding infections, even in a hospital setting. But Landon had also recently developed rheumatoid arthritis-a disease in which a person’s immune system attacks their own joints-and was taking two drugs that, by suppressing said immune system, made her more vulnerable to pathogens. An infectious-disease doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, she was cramming months of work into days, preparing her institution for the virus’s arrival in the United States. When the coronavirus pandemic began, Emily Landon thought about her own risk only in rare quiet moments.
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