The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
New York, US | Xinhua | Long COVID is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work in the United States, with lost wages estimated at least 170 billion U.S. dollars a year, a significant economic burden at a time when the cost of living is rising steeply, Forbes on Friday cited a Brookings report.
The report uses updated data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey in June, which found that 16.3 million people (around 8 percent) of working-age Americans currently have long COVID.
Brookings corroborated those findings with a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis study, which found that 24.1 percent of people who had contracted COVID-19 experienced symptoms for three months or more.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 70 percent of Americans have contracted COVID-19. This percentage translates to 34 million working-age Americans experiencing long COVID symptoms.
A July 2021 study from the Patient-Led Research Collaborative found only about 27 percent of long COVID patients worked as many hours as they did before falling ill, and approximately 23 percent weren’t working at all, as a direct result of long COVID. ■
