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@bothwell
IMO the social attitudes will only meaningfully change when there's some kind of viable treatment. If you come down with something like long covid (or ME), then you're sort of breaking this unspoken social contract that says that illness is a temporary thing, and that you'll automatically get better. If you're in this group of people that don't get better, then, well, fuck, what's wrong with you? Why aren't you fighting it? Don't you WANT to get better? Why aren't you trying harder to beat it?
People IME don't like to think too much about folks who get sick and who just kind of... keep... being sick, especially to the immenese degree of sickness involved in LC and the like. It's shit and it's ableist AF, but at the same time it's quite predictable in terms of how people in the main react to these situations. If a treatment is found, there'll be a collective social amnesia where everyone will instantly forget everything they ever believed about "yuppie flu" or whatever, because now it's a thing with a clear resolution, and these sick people can go ahead and stop doing the thing.