A new study has found about $9.6 billion was lost in economic productivity due to long COVID in 2022.
Researchers say that represented about a quarter of Australia’s real gross domestic product growth for that year.
Some experts are calling on state and federal governments, as well as policymakers, to put greater focus on long COVID.
Comments closedAbout 14% of participants in a new long-COVID study from Yale said they didn’t return to work in the months after their infection, suggesting that the condition results in major economic losses. The study is published in PLOS One.
The study was based on the outcomes of 6,000 participants at eight study sites in Illinois, Connecticut, Washington, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California from 2020 through 2022 as part of the Innovative Support for Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infections Registry, or INSPIRE study.
Comments closedFor months, governmental officials around the world have appeared to want to forgo discussing the specter of long COVID. As a new review makes clear, that is wishful thinking—and the latest COVID variants may well kick long COVID into overdrive, a scenario that researchers and experts have been warning about for some time.
“I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System and lead author of the review. “It is much more pleasant to pretend as if emergency department visits and hospitalizations haven’t been rising sharply this summer.”
In a Nature Medicine review this week, Al-Aly and several other top researchers lay out a difficult truth: Long COVID has already affected an estimated 400 million people worldwide, a number the authors say is likely conservative, at an economic cost of about $1 trillion annually—equivalent to 1% of the global economy.
Comments closedA new report by global economics consultancy Cambridge Econometrics reveals that Long Covid could have wider economic ramifications for the UK causing a drag on economic growth and added pressure on the NHS if no long-term healthcare funding commitments are made.
Funded by direct giving fund Balvi, and in partnership with Professor Emeritus in Public Health Ruairidh Milne from the University of Southampton, the report used available evidence on the cost of Long Covid treatment, economic inactivity among those living with the condition, and prevalence in the UK population to consider the long-term macroeconomic impacts on wider UK society by 2030.
Based on the assumption that there are no long-term healthcare funding commitments to manage Long Covid, the results estimate that Long Covid is likely to reduce GDP by around £1.5bn and 138,000 jobs each year. Were prevalence to increase to 4 million people per year by 2030, the negative impacts would increase to a reduction of around £2.7bn in GDP and 311,000 job losses each year.
Comments closedCOVID-19 is costing the Australian economy billions in lost worker productivity and healthcare spending.
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