MONDAY, Aug. 19, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Millions of Americans -- mostly younger adults -- could be unable to work due to the lingering symptoms of Long COVID, a new study says.

About 14% of working-age people with Long COVID symptoms hadn’t returned to their jobs within three months of their initial infection, researchers found.

“When we compare the rates observed in this study to the national population, it could mean as many as 2 million people may be out of work because of post-COVID conditions,” said lead researcher Dr. Arjun Venkatesh, chair of emergency medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, in New Haven, Conn.

Worse, the average age of those affected was roughly 40, Venkatesh added.

“This has big economic impacts,” Venkatesh said. “It also has impacts on those people individually in terms of their own income security and their ability to care for themselves and their families.”

Results also show that those most stricken by Long COVID are more likely to be unable to work.

The study focused on long-term data gathered on more than 6,000 COVID-19 patients at eight study sites in Illinois, Connecticut, Washington, Pennsylvania, Texas and California.

Among the nearly 3,000 participants who were employed prior to the pandemic, almost 10% reported having five or more symptoms of Long COVID months after their initial infection, researchers said.

“This number was important because we’ve shown in previous studies that the number of symptoms someone has after being infected with SARS-CoV-2 may be more indicative of how severe their Long COVID is,” Venkatesh said.

Those with five or more symptoms were more than twice as likely to not return to work than COVID patients with no long-term symptoms, results showed.

These findings, published recently in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest that people with Long COVID might need the same sort of economic relief and support that was provided to people during the pandemic, Venkatesh argued.

“Given the millions of people who have had COVID-19 in the United States and the millions of people that report prolonged symptoms, this is not a small problem,” said Venkatesh. “So, it does require big interventions.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about Long COVID.

SOURCE: Yale University, news release, Aug. 15, 2024