💞Let's Talk About Disability Law and COVID The Supreme Court said it in 2025: disability discrimination is "most often the product, not of invidious animus, but rather of thoughtlessness and indifference - of benign neglect." Read that again. The law doesn't require you to prove anyone hated you. It requires you to prove you were excluded, denied, or ignored. And the people who excluded, denied, and ignored you are now being held to account. First, identify the responsible defendant - and know you can sue governments and their industry partners. Families sued Cuomo over the nursing-home readmission policy and lost, because qualified immunity shielded the individuals. That's the loophole everyone hides behind. But it's a shield for people, not for the government itself. You can sue the agency, the department, the school district, the prison system - the entity. In Harper v. Cuomo, incarcerated plaintiffs sued the New York State Department of Corrections itself under §1983, the ADA, and Section 504. In Perez v. Sturgis Public Schools, the Supreme Court held that parents can sue a school district for damages under the ADA and Section 504 without first exhausting the IDEA process. The National Association of the Deaf sued the White House itself under Section 504 - and won, forcing ASL interpretation at press briefings. Here's the line: Section 504's text reaches "any program or activity conducted by any Executive agency" - which is why the White House itself is a proper defendant. Sovereign immunity is a separate barrier, and it limits money damages against the federal government, not the right to sue for injunctive relief. You can sue the government to make it stop discriminating; recovering money from the Treasury is the harder fight. In Oregon, the Department of Corrections paid a $49 million settlement for COVID infections and deaths in custody. The law is catching up. The distinction between individual and institutional liability is the difference between a dismissal and a payout - and the payouts are starting to land. Second, a denied accommodation is your strongest claim - and the courts are done with blanket refusals. In Oross v. Kutztown University, a professor with a heart transplant was denied remote work under a blanket "undue hardship" policy - and won, because the university never considered his individual circumstances. In Arc of Iowa v. Reynolds, the Eighth Circuit held that mask requirements are reasonable accommodations required by federal disability law, and enjoined Iowa's school mask-mandate ban. The mask bans are falling. If you requested remote work, modified scheduling, masking, or any accommodation and got a categorical refusal, document it. A blanket "no" is your evidence - and it's the exact thing courts are now rejecting. Third, if you're pursuing a class action, identify a common policy, not a shared diagnosis. Courts reject broad classes because individual exposure histories and injuries vary. The stronger approach: a specific policy, its foreseeable consequences, and measurable excess harm. You don't need every case to share an exposure history. You need a decision whose excess burden is testable against records. That's how you make the class stick. Fourth, know which laws actually pay. Title III of the ADA generally provides injunctive relief, not compensatory damages. Section 504 can permit compensatory damages for intentional discrimination. Sovereign immunity limits claims against governments. That's why the recoveries have come through multiple avenues: insurers (Abrams v. Unum - a Long Covid patient recovered disability benefits despite doctors not agreeing on a single diagnosis), nursing homes (a reported $180,000 COVID-era neglect settlement), universities (Oross - back pay and other relief), and correctional institutions (Oregon's $49 million). The defendant, the cause of action, and the available remedy all matter - and the people who got paid understood all three. The practical lessons: Document denied accommodations and exclusionary policies. Identify the responsible institution, not just the individual. For systemic claims, establish a common policy and measurable harm. Determine which statute gives you an enforceable right - and which remedy it actually allows. Disabled people have already used these laws to win accommodations, recover benefits and lost wages, strike down mask bans, and obtain substantial settlements. You don't need to prove anyone hates disabled people to have enforceable rights. You need to know what those rights are, how they're violated, and how to enforce them. 💞 This post was written, in party, by longcovidbot.com

📈 Cumulative Risk with each SARS2 Infection The dose–response: each infection adds risk The foundational evidence comes from Bowe, Xie & Al-Aly (2022), who studied 5.8 million people in the US Department of Veterans Affairs database. They found that compared with no reinfection, people with two, three, or more infections had progressively higher risks of death, hospitalization, and post-acute sequelae affecting the pulmonary, cardiovascular, hematological, diabetes, gastrointestinal, kidney, mental health, musculoskeletal, and neurological systems. The hazard ratio for developing at least one sequela climbed from 1.35 after the first infection to 2.11 after the second and 3.00 after three or more infections - a clear cumulative, dose-dependent pattern. A large matched cohort from the N3C Data Enclave (2025) - 424,616 individuals, 212,313 matched reinfected/non-reinfected pairs - independently confirmed this, finding reinfection produced a roughly 35% higher incidence of Long Covid (risk ratio 1.35, 95% CI 1.32–1.39), with a cumulative incidence of 11.1% among reinfected versus 8.2% among non-reinfected individuals at one year. The authors explicitly note their result mirrors Bowe et al., the only prior large published study quantifying this effect. A community survey (medRxiv 2026) of 1,543 people found a clear dose–response: each subsequent infection increased the odds of reporting Long Covid by approximately 2-fold, and people who developed Long Covid after their first infection had a 3.2-fold higher risk of reporting symptoms again after a second infection (RR 3.23, 95% CI 2.52–4.13). The same survey found the risk of a second infection was 21% higher for people who had already developed Long Covid (RR 1.21, 95% CI 1.08–1.36) - suggesting Long Covid itself may increase susceptibility to reinfection.

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