from restaurants struggling to replace low-wage workers, to airlines scrambling to replace crew, to overwhelmed hospitals, experts are predicting.
“There’s a lot we need to do to understand what it takes to enable disabled people to participate more in the economy,” said Katie Bach, a senior fellow with Brookings Institution and the author of a study looking into long COVID’s impact on the labor market.
Data from June 2022 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that, of the 40% of American adults who contracted COVID-19, nearly one in five still have long COVID symptoms. That works out to 1 in 13, or 7.5%, of the overall U.S. adult population.
Drawing from the CDC data, Ms. Bach estimates in her August 2022 report that as many as 4 million working-age Americans are too sick with long COVID to perform their jobs. That works out to as much as $230 billion in lost wages, or almost 1% of the U.S. GDP.
“This is a big deal,” she said. “We’re talking potentially hundreds of billions of dollars a year and that this is big enough to have a measurable impact on the labor market.”
Other sources have suggested lower figures, but the conclusions are the same: Long COVID is an urgent issue that will cost tens of billions of dollars a year in lost wages alone, Ms. Bach said. But it’s not just lost income for workers. There is a cost for businesses and the public.
Throughout the pandemic, COVID-19’s crippling force could be felt across multiple industries. While business has picked up again, staffing shortages remain a challenge. At some airports this summer, air passengers spent hours in security lines; were stranded for days as flights were canceled, rebooked, and canceled again on short notice; and waited weeks for lost luggage. Restaurants have had to cut back their hours. Those seeking medical care had longer than usual wait times in EDs and urgent care clinics. Some EDs temporarily closed.
These challenges have been attributed in part to the “great resignation” and in part because so many infected workers were out, especially during the Omicron waves. But increasingly, economists and health care professionals alike worry about long COVID’s impact on employers and the broader economy.
David Cutler, PhD, a professor of economics at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., believes the total economic loss could be as high as $3.7 trillion, when factoring in the lost quality of life, the cost in lost earnings, and the cost of higher spending on medical care. His estimate is more than a trillion dollars higher than a previous projection he and fellow economist Lawrence Summers, PhD, made in 2020. The reason? Long COVID.
“The higher estimate is largely a result of the greater prevalence of long COVID than we had guessed at the time,” Dr. Cutler wrote in a paper released in July.
“There are about 10 times the number of people with long COVID as have died of COVID. Because long COVID is so new, there is uncertainty about all of the numbers involved in the calculations. Still, the costs here are conservative, based on only cases to date.”
In Ms. Bach’s Brookings report, she projected that, if recovery from long COVID does not pick up and the population of Americans with long COVID were to grow by 10% a year, the annual cost of lost wages alone could reach half a trillion dollars in a decade.
Meanwhile, a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that workers who missed an entire week of work because of probable COVID-19 illnesses were roughly 7 percentage points less likely to be working a year later, compared with those who did not miss work for health reasons.
“It’s not just individuals with long COVID who are suffering from this. It impacts their families, their livelihoods, and the economy on a global scale. So, we have to raise awareness about those ripple effects,” said Linda Geng, MD, a clinical assistant professor of medicine with Stanford (Calif.) University’s Primary Care and Population Health.
“I think it’s hard for the public to grasp ... and understand the scale of this public health crisis.”