Unfortunately, even with the end of the national state of emergencies, long COVID still poses exceptional challenges for employers and employees alike. Perhaps one of the most difficult challenges is that long COVID is not clearly defined. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) it can have many forms including Post-COVID Conditions, long-haul COVID, post-acute COVID-19, long-term effects of COVID, and chronic COVID.
The CDC has formulated "post-COVID conditions" to describe health issues that persist more than four weeks after being infected with COVID-19. These include:
- Long COVID (which consists of a wide range of symptoms that can last weeks to months) or persistent post-COVID syndrome (PPCS)
- Multiorgan effects of COVID-19
- Effects of COVID-19 treatment/hospitalization; and/or
- A non-exhaustive list of typical clinical symptoms in "long COVID" are tiredness, fatigue, difficulty thinking or concentrating (sometimes called "brain fog"), shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, headache, persistent loss of smell or taste, cough, depression, low-grade fevers, palpitations, dizziness, muscle pain, and joint pains.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services research suggests that between 5% and 30% of those who had COVID-19 may have long COVID symptoms, and roughly one million people are out of the workforce at any given time due to long COVID.
A 2022 survey conducted by the University Of New Hampshire's Institute on Disability and the Kessler Foundation of nearly 3,800 supervisors found that 40% of them managed employees with lasting physical and/or mental effects of COVID-19 and almost 60% had employees that received some type of accommodation. Almost 30% did not receive accommodations either because the employee did not ask or because of the type of employment.
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