“If someone has to go back 100% when they start feeling a little bit better, they are going to crash and burn fast,” she says. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has seen COVID play out in similar ways in other patients. “Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten as sick as I got, because I wouldn’t have been pushing myself to do the things that I knew couldn’t do, but I kept trying and trying,” she says.ĭr. Maybe her supervisor could have held off on disciplinary action.
She was already working from home due to the pandemic, but perhaps she could have been given a lighter workload. Linders now she thinks back to what she should have asked for after her return to work. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, employers must offer accommodations to workers with disabilities unless doing so presents an undue burden. The Biden administration has already taken some steps to try to protect workers and keep them on the job, issuing guidance that makes clear that long COVID can be a disability and relevant laws would apply. working population.” Long COVID can be a disability under federal law “That is just a shocking number,” says Bach. Katie Bach, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, drew on survey data from the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Lancet to come up with what she says is a conservative estimate: 4 million full-time equivalent workers out of work because of long COVID. Now, millions of people may be sidelined from their jobs due to long COVID.
For more than a year, employers have faced staffing problems, with jobs going unfilled month after month. It’s a pressing question, given the fragile state of the economy. Survey data suggests millions of people aren’t working because of long COVIDĪs the number of people with post-COVID symptoms soars, researchers and the government are trying to get a handle on how big an impact long COVID is having on the U.S. She spends her days advocating for COVID longhaulers like herself and painting, one of the few activities that doesn’t wear her out. Her ongoing battle with long COVID has prevented her from working. Georgia Linders got sick with COVID in the spring of 2020 and never recovered. She could have sued but wasn’t making enough money to hire a lawyer. She filed a discrimination complaint with the government, but it was dismissed. She was given another 90-day probation, but she decided to take medical leave. “But my supervisor brought up my productivity, which was like a quarter of what my coworkers were doing,” she says. After 30 days, she thought her performance had improved. In the fall of 2020, she was put on probation. It was a lot of multitasking, something she excelled at before COVID.Īfter COVID, the brain fog and fatigue slowed her down immensely. Her job required her to be on phone calls all day, coordinating with health clinics that service the military. Linders really noticed problems with her brain when she returned to work in the spring and summer of 2020.
These are commonly reported symptoms of long COVID. Most days, she runs a fever, and when her temperature gets up past a certain point, her brain feels like goo, she says. (NPR) - More than two years after Georgia Linders first got sick with COVID, her heart still races at random times.
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