Caregivers who missed work to tend to family or friends with long COVID lost almost as much pay as people suffering from the illness. That’s cost between $300 million and $1.1 billion in lost wages as of May, the researchers say, not counting replacement income such as paid sick leave or unemployment benefits. Researchers Robert Parker and Benjamin Clark from the University of Oregon found about 7% of working-age Oregonians - roughly 185,000 people - had experienced long COVID by spring of this year. The estimated cost is about $170 billion in lost wages annually. Nationally, up to four million Americans are out of work due to long COVID, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of experimental Census data this summer. And government safety net programs are still coming to terms with the often-baffling new illness. The condition has forced millions of people, in Oregon and across the country, to make hard, private choices about how to survive on diminished income. President Joe Biden recently declared he pandemic over, but the financial pain caused by long COVID is far from through. In fact, patients may have symptoms that routine medical tests can’t explain. Long COVID can be hard to diagnose and there is no single test for it. Symptoms include breathlessness, racing heart, cognitive impairment and profound fatigue. Medical professionals are still learning about long COVID, a range of conditions that can persist months, perhaps even years, after a COVID-19 infection. I wasn’t able to pay bills and things started getting shut off,” said Boyd, who rents an apartment in Lake Oswego with her husband and two stepchildren. By August 2022, her family badly needed money. She struggled for months just to get out of bed or to stand without falling. The condition debilitated her for much of that year. Her doctor concluded she had long COVID-19. She sweated through her sheets night after night.
But she recalls waking up in a panic one day, feeling “completely out of my mind.” She became intensely nauseous and lost control of her bowels.
She had a relatively mild case and started feeling better after a few weeks. She’d made the hard choice to try working again.īoyd first got COVID-19 in January 2021. But despite her dizziness, brain fog and fatigue, she was heading to a new part-time job that day. “Shit.”īoyd had endured these near-blackouts for more than a year and a half. “I’m gonna sit down for just a second, sorry,” she said softly. Boyd hunched over, pressing her hands to her knees. This article was originally published by Oregon Public Broadcasting.Īll she’d done was stand up, but she was moving too fast.
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