Research conclusions from the United States show a very disturbing picture of long-term incapacity for work and economic damage after more than two years of corona. Two to four million Americans, or 1.5 to 2 percent of working people, are at home because of “long COVID”.
This means about 170 billion dollars in damage to labour costs, and that’s not even including health care costs.
Health economist David Cutler estimates the damage from post-COVID at 17 percent of national income. Potentially hefty consequences surrounded with great uncertainty.
One in eight corona infected people suffers from at least one symptom of Long Covid weeks or months after infection. This is the conclusion of a large-scale study from the Netherlands, published in the journal The Lancet. As part of the study, researchers asked 76,300 people to complete an online questionnaire on the most common long Covid symptoms. Between March 2020 and August 2021, each participant completed the questionnaire 24 times.
Over this period, more than 4,200 or 5.5 percent of the participants said that they had been infected with the coronavirus. Of those infected, more than 21 percent had at least one new or a greatly intensified symptom three to five months after the infection. However, almost nine percent of the uninfected participants also reported a similar increase in symptoms.
Nevertheless, according to the researchers, the data indicate that 12.7 percent of corona patients – that is, about one eighth – suffer from long–term complaints. Common long Covid symptoms are chest pain, breathing difficulties, muscle pain, loss of taste and smell and general exhaustion.
Pandemic leads to general health burden
A special feature of the study is the large uninfected control group, with the data of which the researchers were able to distinguish between true late effects of corona and general effects of the pandemic. In the infected, complaints were also recorded before and after the infection, so that the researchers could determine exactly which symptoms are related to the coronavirus infection. The control group made it possible to register other health problems such as stress due to restrictions and uncertainty caused by the pandemic, said the author Aranka Ballering.
The authors point out that the study does not include newer corona variants such as delta or Omikron. For this reason, there is no data on impaired concentration – often called “brain fog”– which has been considered a common sign of long Covid since the appearance of the newer variants. Future studies should therefore also investigate psychological symptoms such as depression and anxiety as well as aspects such as brain fog, insomnia and fatigue even after little physical exertion, the study author Judith Rosmalen recommended.
