Around 18 million adults in the U.S. alone suffer from long Covid, a chronic illness with a wide range of symptoms and severity. With approved therapies a long way off, workers with long Covid often struggle in silence. And most companies have neither a good understanding of the situation nor effective policies in place, say MIT research scientist.
BETH POLLACK: Long COVID is defined by the CDC and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as signs, symptoms and conditions persisting for at least four weeks following infection with SARS-CoV-2. As of March 2024, there are about 17.8 million people in the U.S. who have long COVID. There was a 2022 study of 16,000 people who had COVID previously, and about 15% of them developed long COVID. And an important point here is that we have always had chronic illnesses following infection. Infection-associated chronic illnesses are not new, but SARS-CoV-2 is really important because so many people got it at once. And so what we’re seeing is a large portion of the country and really the world going on to develop chronic symptoms following this infection.
BETH POLLACK: Yeah, so cognitive dysfunction is a very common symptom, which includes brain fog and word finding issues and memory issues as well as autonomic dysfunction, so dysfunction of their autonomic nervous system, which can manifest as dizziness or blood flow issues. Headaches are common, gastrointestinal symptoms are common. Cardiovascular symptoms are common.
BETH POLLACK: Established treatments through clinical trials. Yes. And clinical trials have begun, but it’s not going to be a one size fits all treatment. BETH POLLACK: Yeah. So what the research suggests is that about 65% of people with long COVID are able to continue working and that about 25% of people with long COVID have had to reduce their working hours. So we’re really looking at sometimes very severe manifestations of illness that cause significant reduction in quality of life that also impacts one’s ability to work.
Only 5% of organizations, for example, even consider disability as a part of their diversity considerations. And then they are typically only thinking about very obvious, very visible physical disabilities. When it comes to something that’s non-apparent, most employers have really, really struggled to even consider.
So flexibility is something that really ideally should become a part of the mindset of employers. It’s one of the principles of inclusive organizations. I talk about in my book that intersectionally inclusive, flexibility, something that helps many kinds of people. Let’s talk about accommodating limited “uptime,” right, because you had an amazing story in the article of somebody who was assigned a presentation or a project that was due by the end of the week, excited to have that responsibility, got cracking on it, feeling great, and then had Wednesday, Thursday was bedbound because of a flare-up and just wasn’t able to deliver and just felt horrible about that.
There is sometimes urgent work, but very often we even all know with our own life things are urgent because we haven’t done them or we haven’t planned in advance. I think we’ll find ourselves in that situation.
We often think about work hiatuses, we may think about parental leave or there are many different reasons, but chronic illness is one of them, but it’s not often discussed. And that is such a problematic way of thinking, thinking that losing those people is going to be good turnover because supporting them and helping them to just maybe transition to a somewhat different role within the same organization and providing more flexibility is actually a lot less cost than completely re-advertising, retraining, bringing in new person and not knowing whether or not this hire is actually going to work out because many hires don’t.
LUDMILA PRASLOVA: From the perspective of organizations, managers, HR, what I would love people to know is long COVID and more generally, most disabilities that we talk about do not have to equate to inability or the lack of ability at all, because that is such a typical misconception. People think the word disability and they think the lack of any and all ability.