Masks
One of the quiet, almost forgotten drivers of increases in U.S. employee benefits costs could be the lingering effects of COVID-19.
Dan Shan and other researchers touch on the impact of long COVID in a new paper backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and posted on the website of Med Research.
Shan and the other researchers used national public health program disability data and other data to calculate the impact of long COVID on "years lived with disability" for each country in the world and for each U.S. state in 2021.
Although COVID has killed more than 1.2 million people in the United States in 2021, it caused fewer than 150 years lived with disability per 100,000 people in typical U.S. states, the researchers found.
That was well below the typical rate of about 300 years lived with disability due to long COVID in the world as a whole.
But states like West Virginia appeared to have much higher long COVID rates than some other states, and the long COVID disability rate was higher for core working-age U.S. residents — people ages 20 through 54 — than for U.S. residents ages 55 and older.
U.S. residents ages 20 through 54 faced about 179 years lived with disability per 100,000 people due to long COVID in 2021, compared with an YLD rate of just 162 YLD per 100,000 people for U.S. residents ages 55 and older.
In other rich countries, like Japan and Norway, the YLD rate was higher for people ages 55 and older than for younger adults, the researchers said.
The unusual U.S. results match "findings from two recent United States long COVID studies suggesting that younger and middle-aged adults were more severely impacted by long COVID than older adults," the researchers said. "Taken together, this combined evidence suggests that YLD rates in 2021 could serve as a useful preliminary measure to indicate age- and sex-specific groups that might be at higher risks of long COVID morbidity in subsequent years."
What it means: If employers are looking at their plan data and seeing higher claims for kidney disease, stroke or even cancer, that could be a sign that COVID is continuing to eat away at plan participants' health and productivity.
Related: Federal appeals court sides with disability insurer in long COVID case
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.