Evidence mounts on long COVID toll on workforce

Nearly 15 percent of adults in the United States with a prior positive COVID-19 test reported long COVID, symptoms that are estimated to have forced 420,000 workers out of the labor force, recent studies have shown, as experts warned of a looming "tripledemic" of respiratory viruses this winter.

In a study published online on Friday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, Roy H. Perlis from Massachusetts General Hospital and his fellow researchers analyzed how common COVID-19 symptoms lasting longer than two months — also known as long COVID — are among adults in the US.

They found that 14.7 percent of the 16,091 surveyed individuals reported current symptoms of long COVID, representing 2 percent of the US adult population.

The researchers noted that slightly more than three-quarters, or 76.1 percent, of long COVID cases occurred among women, compared with 23.9 percent among men. They also found there is approximately a 24 percent reduction in the odds of having long COVID after a single vaccination.

Survey participants reported fatigue as the most common symptom, followed by loss of smell, shortness of breath and brain fog.

The frequency of individual symptoms also differed significantly by gender, with women significantly more likely than men to report loss of smell, cognitive symptoms, anxiety and sleep disruptions.

"This study suggests that long COVID is prevalent and that the risk varies among individual subgroups in the United States; vaccination may reduce this risk," the researchers wrote.

Louise Sheiner, policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, noted that there is growing evidence that some people infected with the coronavirus experience long-running health problems known as long COVID, potentially leading them to drop out of the labor force.

"Decomposing our total estimate into the effect of long COVID and the effect of remote work, we estimate that about 420,000 workers aged 16-64 likely left the labor force because of long COVID, with a reasonable range of 281,000 to 683,000 (0.2 percent to 0.4 percent of the labor force)," Sheiner wrote in a paper published recently.

As of Tuesday, deaths attributed to the coronavirus in the US were 1,070,389, with 2,649 logged for last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

CDC data showed that 7 percent of males and 8 percent of females in the US had received updated COVID-19 boosters as of Oct 26.

The CDC also reported that early increases in seasonal flu activity continued last week.

With influenza launching an early attack this year, experts warned that the winter could be tough, as a likely surge of coronavirus infections will coincide with the flu, along with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, a common respiratory infection that is spreading at unusually high levels and overwhelming children's hospitals, according to US media reports.

"We were expecting flu and COVID to go together, but we were not expecting RSV to be this high," said Mansoor Amiji, professor in the departments of pharmaceutical sciences and chemistry at Northeastern University, on Tuesday.

The public should get ready for a "bumpy ride", viruswise, as autumn turns into winter this year, the university said in an article "How COVID-19 colliding with flu season and a surge of RSV created 'tripledemic'", posted on its website on Tuesday.

"We used to worry about a twin-demic. Now some people are worried about a tri-demic: influenza, COVID, and RSV," William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University professor and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, was quoted by Vox as saying on Sunday.