Approximately 400 million people worldwide are living with Long COVID. According to a new Yale study, the symptoms of long COVID have caused many Americans to miss significant amounts of work. 14% of study participants reported not returning to work in the months after their infection.
The findings, published recently in PLOS One, show that long COVID has harmed millions of Americans. The impacts of the virus have resulted in significant economic losses. Thus highlighting the need for measures to support people suffering from long COVID, according to the researchers.
The study was based on a long-term survey of people who contracted COVID-19, known as the Innovative Support for Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infections Registry, or INSPIRE. INSPIRE began recruiting participants in the fall of 2020 and ran through the summer of 2022. More than 6,000 participants from eight study locations in Illinois, Connecticut, Washington, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California were surveyed at the time of recruitment and every three months for the next 18 months.
The Yale researchers focused on participant replies to work-related questions, such as whether they returned to work after contracting COVID-19 and how many workdays they missed as a result of COVID-19 symptoms. They also measured how many symptoms people experienced after contracting COVID-19.
According to an August 2024 study published in Nature Medicine, long COVID is estimated to have an annual impact of $1 trillion worldwide. This is roughly equivalent to 1% of the global economy.
Due to people being unable to work, long COVID has also strained the Social Security Administration. Long Covid is difficult to add onto the agency’s existing disability insurance eligibility rules, according to Stephanie Rennane, an economist at the RAND Corporation who has examined disability benefits. “The severity and duration of the condition can vary a lot, and in ways that we can’t fully predict yet. Even after 4 years, the research landscape in this area is evolving quickly and summary reports like this are a helpful way to translate the state of knowledge into something actionable for policymakers,” she said in an email.
A panel of experts from several medical fields convened seven times under the leadership of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine to distill the scientific literature. The result is a 200-plus-page study documenting Covid’s widespread impact, both in the public and in individual people’s bodies, which has a toll on many organ systems.
Long COVID has also led to mounting debt for some people. Kirby Orr caught COVID-19 in December 2020. She was the sole provider for her family and had two jobs in nursing.
At the beginning of 2021, she stopped working as an on-call acute psychiatric nurse at Providence Portland Medical Center. She couldn’t do a physically demanding job since she was out of breath. She continued to work part-time in Kaiser Permanente Northwest’s addiction medicine department for about a year after that.
Orr and her wife couldn’t afford the dramatic pay cut. They had van payments, kids to feed, and rent to pay. They maxed out their credit cards, but that was a high-interest trap.
They ultimately took out loans totaling $50,000. They immediately paid off some debt. Things gradually improved over time. Orr switched to a full-time position at Kaiser around a year into long COVID. The dramatic loss in income meant the family was still paying $800 a month for their loans as of October of 2022.
Millions of Americans have been impacted by long COVID. Long COVID has left so many people with devastating symptoms. It will likely be years before the economic impacts of Long COVID are well understood.
Sources:
Al-Aly, Ziyad, et al. ‘Long COVID Science, Research and Policy’. Nature Medicine, vol. 30, no. 8, Aug. 2024, pp. 2148–2164, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03173-6.
Cueto, Isabella. “‘Concern Is Real’ about Long Covid’s Impact on Americans and Disability Claims, Report Says.” STAT , Boston Globe Media, 6 June 2024, http://www.statnews.com/2024/06/06/long-covid-disability-national-academy-of-sciences/.
Davidson, Kate. “Lost Wages and Mounting Debt: The Economic Blow of Long Covid-19 in Oregon.” Oregon Public Broadcasting, PBS, 17 Oct. 2022, https://www.opb.org/article/2022/10/17/coronavirus-covid-19-long-illness-fatigue-symptoms-oregon/.
Venkatesh, Arjun K., et al. ‘The Association between Prolonged SARS-CoV-2 Symptoms and Work Outcomes’. PLOS ONE, vol. 19, no. 7, Public Library of Science, July 2024, p. e0300947, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0300947.