Is the flood after a huge storm a different natural disaster than the storm itself? Of course not, that's silly.
The right way to frame this as a separate-but-connected crisis would be the huge neglected crisis of chronic illness, which is relevant in COVID but indeed a separate issue, a global health crisis, and one that has been neglected for many decades, with disastrous outcomes for millions.
Because otherwise Long Covid is the same crisis as COVID, it's just that there were multiple similarly-neglected crises already, of which Long Covid is only the latest.
It's an ongoing health crisis. Nothing next about it. In fact it literally dates back many decades, centuries if we're going to be pedantic about it. But all this talk about an upcoming crisis or a looming disaster serves is to keep the pretense that it's a concern for the future, rather than a decades-old crisis of negligence and ideological systemic failure that is ongoing and where the negligence only compounds the harm.
Also because it has to be said: we told you so, literally thousands, probably tens of thousands, told you so, at a detailed level that is frankly unique in how accurate it ended up being, right up to the complete mismanagement by the medical profession.
Everyone in a position of authority ignored this crisis, including every single medical and public health institution in the world. And yet many thousands of complete amateurs predicted it, millions of amateurs understood it quickly out of lived experience, and the medical profession is still leagues deep up their own ass over it, refuses to do anything, which is the real ongoing crisis dating back decades.