Study: 'Long COVID' takes toll on workforce

Nearly 15% in US who once had coronavirus tell of lasting symptoms as experts warn of 'tripledemic'

Nearly 15 percent of US adults 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, the latest studies have found, as experts warned a "tripledemic" of respiratory viruses is looming this winter.

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

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 (76.1 percent) of long COVID cases occurred among women, compared with 23.9 percent among men, and that there is approximately a 24 percent reduction in odds of 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 (46 percent versus 35 percent), cognitive symptoms (49 percent versus 36 percent), anxiety (31 percent versus 22 percent), and sleep disruptions (32 percent versus 23 percent).

"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, a director for the 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 ages 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)," the senior fellow wrote in a paper published on Thursday.

US President Joe Biden’s Education Secretary Miguel Cardona tested positive for the coronavirus Tuesday after he attended Halloween festivities at the White House the day before.

As of Tuesday, the deaths attributed to the coronavirus in the US were 1,070,389, with 2,649 logged for last week, not significant change from the previous week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who tested positive for the coronavirus earlier last month has tested positive again after completing the coronavirus antiviral treatment Paxlovid, the agency said on Monday.

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

The CDC also reported that early increases in seasonal flu activity continued last week, with the southeast and south-central areas of the country reporting the highest levels of activity.

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 flu, along with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a common respiratory infection that is spreading at unusually high levels, 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," Mansoor Amiji, professor in the departments of pharmaceutical sciences and chemistry at Northeastern University, said 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 surge of RSV created ‘tripledemic’", posted on its website 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.com as saying on Sunday.