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Paper short abstract

Long COVID gives rise to a state of temporary chronicity where patients oscillate between hopes of recovery and fears of deterioration. Based on interviews, this study shows how uncertain trajectories compel patients to continuously reimagine what constitutes a livable present and a desirable future

Paper long abstract

In the absence of established clinical knowledge about trajectory and prognosis, Long COVID places patients in a distinctive temporal and existential position, in which illness is neither an acute episode nor a stabilized chronic condition. Patients are informed that they will likely recover, yet clinicians cannot specify when, how, or whether improvement will occur. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Long COVID patients in Denmark, this study examines how people navigate the reality of a prolonged and unpredictable condition. The analysis shows how patients fluctuate between hopes of bettering and fears of worsening when symptoms evolve, persist, or reappear, and how they continuously reconfigure their sense of self, health, and everyday life through entanglements with medical assessments, rehabilitation programs, bodily symptoms, and social relations. Suspended between expectations of recovery and forms of temporary chronic living, Long COVID emerges as a fragile temporal position in which neither recovery nor chronicity can be fully inhabited, and where questions about what constitutes a livable present and a desirable future are continuously reimagined. By analyzing how temporary chronicity unsettles established distinctions between acute and chronic illness, the paper foregrounds how post‑infectious conditions generate forms of living that are inherently provisional, unstable, and negotiated. Understanding these unsettled futures invites us to rethink how care infrastructures, diagnostic categories, and societal expectations accommodate lives amid medical uncertainty. The study contributes to debates on pandemic illness narratives, suspended temporalities, and chronic living by showing how Long COVID patients navigate fragile futures that are neither fully open nor fully foreclosed.