The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
About six months after having a near-death experience with COVID-19, back in the coronavirus’s first wave, Michael Flor was recovering strongly and was surrounded by family and friends. But he started feeling a tug of emptiness.
“I realized I just wanted to connect with other people who had had COVID,” Flor of West Seattle says.
So he started posting his story — about how he’d spent 62 days in an Issaquah hospital, including a month on a ventilator — on an online COVID support site called “Survivor Corps.”
“I couldn’t believe the reaction,” Flor, 71, says. “It all came pouring out — out of me and out of them. I think there’s millions of people out there who are still dealing with this. … There’s no closure.”
Ending a pandemic is not something we’ve done before, not in a century anyway. For many it’s proving not as simple as getting your shots and taking off your mask. “The pandemic’s mental wounds are still wide open,” The Atlantic magazine headlined an article this past week. It was about post-pandemic trauma — how the “understandable societal desire to move past the pandemic” may, at the same time, be alienating to people who are still struggling with the disease, or unresolved grief about loss.
Flor is seeing this firsthand. He’s become a sort of unofficial COVID counselor to dozens of strangers he’s met online. He talks them through medical situations and sympathizes with how challenging it all is. He’s found that for something that’s been the world’s top news story for more than a year, there remains a space where people desperately need to talk.
“I think some people are feeling left out or forgotten a little bit,” he says. “The pain of all this hasn’t really been addressed.”
The pandemic has become so politicized that many people are reluctant to broach the subject. The news also has shifted away from chronicling the disease aspect of the pandemic, though 600 per day still are dying from it.
Flor has begun proposing in-person COVID survivor meetups as a way around this sense of being marooned. He also has gone back to Swedish Issaquah to thank the doctors and nurses, many of whom he never knew because he was unconscious for much of his time there.
Flor became briefly famous a year ago when this column featured the $1.1 million price tag for his treatment. He’s no longer the most expensive COVID patient — one man in New York later had $1.9 million in charges submitted to insurance. But at the time, Flor’s story appeared everywhere, from People magazine to the “Today” show to El Pais in Madrid. He was interviewed by news stations in Brazil and France, and told his tale, by video, to a congressional hearing about the high costs of health care.
“The cost of my survival was more interesting to people than my survival,” he jokes.
On his trip through the media circus, he noticed something unexpected: He needed it. There’s something about the isolating force of this pandemic that’s unresolved and has got to come out.
“I didn’t know it, but I had to talk about it,” he says. “Looking back, I found that talking to all you in the media was therapeutic.”
Now that’s a new one, the press as therapists. It shows that even as the disease aspect of this pandemic is winding down, the story of it may only be beginning.
Morning Briefing Newsletter
Get a rundown of the latest local and regional news every Mon-Fri morning.
