A new report published this week by the Brookings Institution showed that up to four million people in the US may be out of work due to long COVID, NBC News reported.
The report noted that this number could add up to at least $170 billion per year of lost wages.
The report examined US adults who worked full-time or the equivalent of full-time hours prior to suffering long COVID. This number was estimated based on federal data to be around 12 million people in the US.
The researchers then examined how many people were out of work or working less hours due to persistent health issues following a COVID-19 infection, NBC added. They used the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, including as long COVID sufferers only those whose symptoms lasting three months or longer, and who did not suffer those symptoms before they contracted COVID-19.
The Brookings Institute then determined that between two and four million people in the US are working reduced hours or not at all due to long COVID.
Katie Bach, the report's author and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, was quoted by NBC as saying, "This is a shocking number. If this looks like other post-viral illnesses, some people will recover, but there will be this big stock of people who don't, and it will just continue to grow over time."
"Every time you get COVID, you risk getting long COVID. It's not like once you've had COVID once, or once you've been vaccinated, then you're all clear," Bach said. "If people keep getting infected and reinfected, we will continue to have new cases of long COVID emerging."
In June, a study from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 19% of adults who had previously been infected with COVID-19, and 1 in 13 adults in the US, suffer from long COVID symptoms.