i fall asleep listening to ed yong's first article on long haulers, and wake up to read the second one. i stop on brain fog— since i have that, am i a long hauler? long haulers are people who have symptoms of corona that malinger for months, and maybe will never leave. but i've had the brain fog for years. the other thing i note is some mild arthritis in my hands, but that started before corona too. the pandemic becomes the paradigm we process our sentient experience with, the window we view the world through and the reflective lens we peer through into our own bodies, even if we are untested, asymptomatic, or tested negative. my brain fog is part of the pandemic, even if it came before, and it seems there was no before now, just a nostalgia for a time we thought was normal and acted like. it's the same as before, a juddering continuum—a national virtual unconsciousness and a fog in the individual brain. what is essential and what is individual are questions that keep recurring. 
and i don't know, the silent echo, an inscrutable unaccountable system, a body of mystery.