A man receives a COVID-19 shot in Waterbury, Vermont, the United States, on June 17, 2021. (WILSON RING / AP)
NEW YORK / BRUSSELS – Long COVID is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work in the United States, with lost wages estimated at least US$170 billion a year, a significant economic burden at a time when the cost of living is rising steeply, Forbes on Friday cited a Brookings report.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 70 percent of Americans have contracted COVID-19
The report uses updated data from the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey in June, which found that 16.3 million people (around 8 percent) of working-age Americans currently have long COVID-19.
Brookings corroborated those findings with a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis study, which found that 24.1 percent of people who had contracted COVID-19 experienced symptoms for three months or more.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 70 percent of Americans have contracted COVID-19. This percentage translates to 34 million working-age Americans experiencing long COVID-19 symptoms.
A July 2021 study from the Patient-Led Research Collaborative found only about 27 percent of long COVID patients worked as many hours as they did before falling ill, and approximately 23 percent weren't working at all, as a direct result of long COVID-19.
This Feb 4, 2022 picture shows in a reflection the new logo of French pharmaceutical group Sanofi which is presented on the day of the group's 2021 full year results at Sanofi headquarters in Paris. (ERIC PIERMONT / AFP)
Sanofi
The European Union's drugs regulator may be a few weeks from deciding whether to approve the experimental COVID-19 vaccine developed by French drugmaker Sanofi and its British partner GSK, a Sanofi executive said on Monday.
The companies' bivalent vaccine targets the Beta variant as well as the original Wuhan strain of the virus. Trial results also showed the shot confers protection against the Omicron variant currently widespread in Europe.