“As a neonatologist, ... prior to COVID, I had maybe attended two to three deliveries in the medical ICU because it’s not common for women of childbearing age in their 20s and 30s to be critically ill and sick,” she said. Now, she said, “I truly cannot remember the last time I was on call at night and did not have to attend a COVID delivery. We’re just seeing a lot more complications in moms who you would expect to be healthy.”

“I think people have this idea, and you see this over and over again, that this is basically a cold or this is essentially the flu. And I think for a lot of people, that’s been their personal experience. But when you look at it as a whole, that’s again just not true,” Bernstein said “... And a lot of people have said things like people aren’t dying ‘of’ COVID, they’re dying ‘with’ COVID. And when you look at the number of excess deaths over the last couple of years, that’s just, quite frankly, untrue.”

Not all those who posted their own stories of chronic illness were visibly young and healthy, though. Some were seniors, and some posted images of their medical treatments or hospital beds as they receive care for COVID-19.

“But I do have that underlying condition that puts me at increased risk,” she said. “I think sometimes people do have this preconceived notion of what someone with multiple chronic illnesses looks like. And unfortunately, that makes it easy to kind of dismiss some of these things. ... People say things like, ‘Well, you don’t look sick to me,’ and that may be the truth. But it doesn’t make the underlying condition or what you deal with on sometimes a daily basis any less true.”

“I went from running long distances to passing out after walking up a flight of stairs,” Bernstein said. “For quite some time, it really drastically altered my life and the things that I was able to do.”

mono

that chronically ill patients have such low quality of life anyway that they aren’t worth protecting

One reason Bernstein said she included her picture is that she looks healthy and young, contrary to images that people may have in their minds

Utah Department of Health reports that 81% of the state’s coronavirus deaths were patients who were “high risk,” only 52% of hospitalizations were of people deemed to have risk factors for serious illness.

asthma

obesity,

diabetes

But Utah health officials have said about half of the state’s adults are at elevated risk of serious illness from the coronavirus.

“If I get Covid, I could very well die. I exercise. I have a good diet. I’m ‘healthy’ apart from the fact that I have one lung. This is a comorbidity that some people think means my life doesn’t matter.”

The implication, for many who fall into those categories, is that their lives are not worth as much as those who are young and illness-free.

those categories

implication

Now thousands of people have shared their own stories about living through the pandemic with chronic illness — and about coping with remarks from media personalities and even health officials that minimize the human toll of COVID-19 because deaths and hospitalizations disproportionately affect people who are old or have underlying medical conditions.

“What I was seeing in the hospital and ... the patients that I was caring for and the families, and then my own personal experience ... was kind of in conflict with a lot of the things I was reading in the news, on Twitter and actually hearing from friends, about the pandemic being over and about omicron being mild and no big deal,” Bernstein said in a news conference this week.

#IHaveAPreexistingCondition

“Does the face of #chronicIllness look different than you thought?”

neonatologist

dismissed

devalued