Cleared by doctors, but not by the public: After COVID-19, survivors face stigma
Patti Kirk-Byrne, left, Dashauna Ballard and Sadie Nagamootoo are among those who have survived the coronavirus, only to be ostracized by friends and colleagues. The hurt they experienced went beyond standard social distancing, they said.Chelsea Stahl / NBC News
In the three months since Dashauna Ballard of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, recovered from the coronavirus, she has learned to not mention that she was ever sick. Some people give her suspicious looks when they find out she had COVID-19; some assume she got it because she did not take proper hygiene measures; and, recently, an acquaintance from church implied that Ballard, 29, caught the virus as punishment for sins she committed.
“People act like you did something to catch it, or you did something wrong, and that’s why you got it,” Ballard, an academic accommodations specialist for university students, said. “I feel like I have a scarlet letter on my chest.”
In a time when they need it the most, many survivors of the coronavirus are finding that their support system wants nothing to do with them. Having recovered from the illness, they now face a new challenge: stigma from family, friends and co-workers.
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**Comment**
Unbelievable.
Treating people like lepers happens all the with Lyme/MSIDS. Many friends and even family just fall away. They don’t like hanging out with a person who continues to be ill and even blame you for it or state you are imagining it. I’ve experienced this. Not fun.
A few things stick out:
- Our ‘authorities’ and mainstream media are directly to blame for the prevailing fear and heartless response due to their daily fear-pandering and ‘ongoing edict to practice social distancing’. We are adults and should be able to look out for ourselves. We don’t need the government telling us how to live and act. Again, the death rate for COVID is nearly the same as the seasonal flu. People die every single day. Although unfortunate, this is nothing new. What is new is the media’s hyper focus on it. Isn’t it interesting that with Lyme/MSIDS they continually underplay it by reassuring us that only a low percentage of ticks are infected and you only need to worry if you live in a certain geographical area, despite the mounting evidence that ticks are spreading everywhere and taking their diseases with them? Every day articles cross my desk telling me that a certain tick-borne illness or manifestation is ‘rare.’ Again, ‘authorities’ have tipped their hand by showing the polar opposite way they are handling the two diseases for their own selfish purposes: https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/04/26/cdc-playbook-learning-from-lyme/ and https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/07/30/how-the-cdc-uses-their-own-guidelines-to-rig-the-system/
- Our ‘authorities’ and MSM are doing nothing to counter common COVID mythology like, “You never know, you may still have it in you.” This is craziness. Do you say the same thing to people who just got over the flu, because coronaviruses make up 10-15% of the seasonal flu each and every year. You can not “magically” transmit things to people after you have recovered.
- Along those same lines, ‘authorities’ have not countered the mythology that asymptomatic people are spreading COVID like wildfire – making each and every person a guilty suspect – forever. This is wrecking untold havoc on relationships. According to Beda M Stadler, former director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Bern, a biologist and professor emeritus, it was wrong to claim that this virus was novel, even more wrong to claim that the population would not already have some immunity against it, and was the crowning of stupidity to claim that someone could have Covid-19 without any symptoms at all or even to pass the disease along without showing any symptoms whatsoever. But do our ‘authorities’ state anything about these facts? Nope. It gets in the way of their purpose: sell expensive drugs and vaccines they own the patents on. https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/07/10/coronavirus-why-everyone-was-wrong/
- Lastly, the following quote rings all too familiar for Lyme/MSIDS patients:
“What baffles me is the hypocrisy of the behavior of people when it actually hits your circle,” she said, adding that the other family did not check in on her and her daughter when they were sick. “There was no compassion or empathy, not even a phone call to see how we were doing.”
We have a saying in the Lyme community and goes like this:
You don’t ‘get’ Lyme until you get Lyme.
Listen to this brief 7 Min. clip with Del Bigtree: https://thehighwire.com/videos/america-finally-goes-herd/
America Finally Goes Herd
President Trump made a major move this week naming Stanford doctor, Scott Atlas, MD, a special advisor to the President, signaling a new change in COVID policy as America tries to emerge from the pandemic. Did The HighWire have something to do with it?
