Young People Navigating the Looping Effects of Long Covid: Exhausting Agency and the ‘Ongoing After’ of Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Seeing beyond the COVID‐19 pandemic as an extraordinary spectacle situated in the past, we draw on qualitative research with young people to trace experiences of Long Covid as ‘looping effects’ of entangling physical and social impacts which intersect with, and extend, those of pandemic. Navigating the capacity to do ordinary things becomes highly contingent, and exhausting work, in the face of Long Covid. The physical impacts of illness, including fatigue, are materialised in altering biographical and social relationships, and managing the ‘social life’ of Long Covid is a key concern. The lifetimes of Long Covid and pandemic also feed into one another. Configurations of the COVID‐19 pandemic as a thing of the past, and social responses felt discounting of the Long Covid experience, enact ongoing illness as ‘out of sync’, and contribute as elements of exhausted agency and extended precarity. The social impacts of the pandemic looping with Long Covid become iterations without clear end; events ongoing in the living present. Understanding how Long Covid extends the ‘ongoing after’ of pandemic highlights the need for lasting social support for affected young people.