There is certainly a problem for the longer term issue of ME, which many do not believe in, but the LongCovid problem currently being faced pretty much entirely falls within the frame of post-viral illness that doctors do recognise - and especially the BPS enthusiasts in fact. My main BPS enthusiast colleague would have happily accepted that LongCovid was like post-EBV malaise - in fact revelled in talking about it.
It may be that some younger physicians have failed to take on board the concept of long term convalescence after major illness which was such prominent features health care fifty years ago. Society (what you read in the papers) may have forgotten, certainly. Levinovitz has sort of got the message about ME but I can't see that has much to do with being 'unprepared for post-infective illness' - except in the sociopolitical context, which I can see is dire in the US.
The US sociopolitical issues with masks and vaccines is unquestionably a mess but this is not about that. It's about how the medical community has been responding to post-infective illness for decades.
I had a post-infectious set of symptoms in 1975 that landed me in the hospital and was told to rest for 6 months. But by at least the mid to late 1980s, that clinical management approach after infection appears to have changed, with a heavy lift from the BPS school and their theories regarding ME. Yes, they readily accept that infections can initiate a postinfectious condition. But according to them, it's the symptom focusing, excessive rest and subsequent deconditioning that's perpetuating the condition. The infection clears quickly, its people's behaviors and attitudes that keep them ill.
While different in important ways, the institutional treatment of Lyme echoes a similar narrative - treat for 10 days and if the patient is still not better, Lyme disease is certainly not the problem.
Those narratives were advanced by powerful players and effectively precluded appropriate clinical care or any serious investigation of ME or Lyme as biomedical diseases. Yes, ME is a complex disease but it's not the lack of the needed technology since the 1980s that kept us from researching it. It's the stigma, the starved funding, the academic centers who refused to allow their staff to research the disease, and the utter neglect and dismissal by the medical community that kept anyone from asking the needed questions.
And that's the clinical narrative we went into the pandemic with. If you had a mild or moderate COVID infection, you'd be "recovered" in a few weeks. The very fact that virtually no one in the medical world warned about the risk of a longCOVID syndrome developing for so long shows how strong that "quick recovery after infection" narrative was.
And if COVID patients don't recover quickly? Even now, some longCOVID patients are being told their continuing symptoms are not the result of COVID but rather the result of stress and somatization and being overly preoccupied with their symptoms. They need to not let their illness control their life and need to exercise through the pain. A playbook straight out of the BPS school and echoes of the MUS/SSD/BDS/BDD/functional syndrome stew.
We were unprepared for longCOVID because the research and medical communities have consciously chosen for decades to ignore, dismiss, or starve post-infectious illness and instead focused on these simplistic theories and behavioral and attitudinal fixes for the cover and easy out they provided