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Paper short abstract

Despite migrants being disproportionately affected by COVID-19 in Sweden, they are largely absent in post-COVID care. Interviews with stakeholders and migrant community representatives suggest that this absence reflects barriers to care and epistemic marginalization rather than a lack of symptoms.

Paper long abstract

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, research documented stark racial and ethnic inequalities in infection rates, hospitalisation, and mortality. In Sweden, migrants were disproportionately affected during the acute phase of the pandemic. Yet, when attention shifted to post-COVID, migrants appeared largely absent from clinical cohorts and care settings. This article takes this epidemiological incongruity as its starting point and asks: Where have the migrants gone?

Drawing on the sociology of diagnosis and feminist intersectionality, we analyse how post-COVID has emerged as a diagnosis within Swedish healthcare and how social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and class shape its recognition. The study is based on 36 interviews with policymakers, healthcare professionals, researchers, patients and community representatives. Our initial intention was to recruit migrant patients with post-COVID, but recruitment through healthcare settings proved unfeasible due to their apparent absence from post-COVID clinics and primary care. Consequently, we reached out to migrant communities and conducted interpreter-mediated group interviews in Somali, Dari, and Arabic in order to understand experiences of persistent symptoms after COVID-19.

Our findings suggest that migrants’ absence in post-COVID care does not reflect an absence of symptoms, but rather barriers related to language, diagnostic practices, healthcare access, and differing forms of recognition of illness. By foregrounding migrants’ experiences, the article highlights how certain patient groups become epistemically marginalized in healthcare systems. We argue that addressing post-COVID inequities requires attention not only to epidemiology but also to epistemic justice, recognising whose experiences count as legitimate knowledge in the production of medical diagnoses.