Medical uncertainty, structural inequities and disease: The experiences of long-COVID among racialized immigrants and racialized non-immigrants in Canada

Jun 9, 2026Social science & medicine (1982)

Long-COVID experiences and health challenges in racialized immigrants and non-immigrants in Canada

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Long Covid on OpenScience ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗

Abstract

Focus groups with 6 participants indicate that uncertainties surrounding long COVID may reinforce existing inequalities.

Long COVID is associated with uncertain and varied symptoms affecting multiple bodily systems.
Racialized individuals, immigrants, part-time workers, and low-income groups are disproportionately impacted by long COVID.
Uncertainties related to long COVID may limit access to critical health, socio-economic, and political resources.
The effects of long COVID uncertainties could create new forms of social suffering by neglecting and delegitimizing the illness.
Knowledge gaps exist regarding how long COVID uncertainties can exacerbate existing inequalities.

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Long COVID impacts millions of people worldwide, creating uncertain and varied symptoms that affect a range of bodily systems, with implications for individual and societal health and wellbeing. Yet, since there is no universal standardized way to diagnose long COVID, it has become a highly contested illness, with consequences for the recognition, resources, and responses directed towards the illness. While contested illnesses are known to foster discrimination via medical uncertainty, little is known about the synergistic effects of uncertainty, long COVID, and inequities. Research highlights that racialized individuals, immigrants, part-time workers, and low-income groups are disproportionately impacted by long COVID; however, knowledge gaps exist surrounding the ways long COVID uncertainties can compound, reproduce, and re-work existing fault lines of inequalities and patterns of disadvantage. This article examines the ways long COVID uncertainty shapes access, use, and control of health, economic, and political resources in Peel Region and how they converge to shape uneven lives. Findings from focus groups (n = 6) with racialized immigrants and non-immigrants managing long COVID reveal uncertainties surrounding long COVID reinscribe inequities by limiting access to critical health, socio-economic, and political resources needed for daily survival. The findings also reveal how long COVID uncertainties create new forms of by social suffering by delegitimizing, neglecting, and responsibilizing issues of long COVID, with implications for knowledge production, societal awareness, and policy creation. We close with a discussion of the impacts for policy and practice.