Nearly 4 million people are not working due to long covid
Data on the condition’s prevalence was limited, so the report used various studies to make a conservative estimate: 1.6 million full-time equivalent workers could be out of work due to long Covid. With 10.6 million unfilled jobs at the time, long Covid potentially accounted for 15% of the labor shortage.
This June, the Census Bureau finally added four questions about long Covid to its Household Pulse Survey (HPS), giving researchers a better understanding of the condition’s prevalence. This report uses the new data to assess the labor market impact and economic burden of long Covid, and finds that:
Around 16 million working-age Americans (those aged 18 to 65) have long Covid today.
Of those, 2 to 4 million are out of work due to long Covid.
The annual cost of those lost wages alone is around $170 billion a year (and potentially as high as $230 billion).
So here is my question. Is this long covid? Or is this long vaccine injury? Or is it a mix of both? What has become more and more difficult as we deal with patients that have ongoing health issues is this: are their health issues due to having covid or having the spike proteins from the vaccine PLUS covid? Now I will say this. I have some very sick patients who have not been “ok” since catching covid. But the caveat here is they all had covid prior to the vaccines coming out, but they ALL GOT THE VACCINE after having covid. And have never recovered from their symptoms. This muddies the water and makes it very difficult to know what is causing the issues; when we added the vaccine after a covid infection that caused prolonged issues, we truly do not know what the causative agent is. And sadly, most physicians deny long covid, have no clue how to treat it, and brush patients off when they are struggling with life changing health issues. Functional medicine is your best bet to get the best chance at treatment that may help you feel better. But the numbers of people out of the workforce due to illness are staggering. This is supported by our previous post about the number of Americans that have applied for disability over the last year.