Finally, scientists are making progress on long COVID

I’ve been thinking about the old-fashioned term “invalid.” In the 19th century, popular literature was awash with characters like Beth in Little Women, who patiently knitted away in her sickbed until she succumbed to long-term damage from scarlet fever. Characters like Beth were a prettied-up version of reality. Many children died or were disabled by diseases that we can now fend off with antibiotics and vaccines.

My mother could have been one of those grim true-life stories. As a child in the 1930s, she almost died from an infection of the mastoid bone, which is typically caused by ear infections.