'Long COVID could be costing U.S. between $2 billion and $6.5 billion annually'

 The current number of long COVID-19 cases may already be costing the U.S. $2.01–6.56 billion dollars per year, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The study also showed that each long COVID case tended to cost society between $5,084 and $11,646. These estimates are based on a computer simulation model developed by the Public Health Informatics, Computational and Operations Research (PHICOR) team based at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) working with researchers from the CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health (ISPH) and Baylor College of Medicine.

"Our results quantify the already significant burden of long COVID on society," says the study's senior author, CUNY SPH Professor Bruce Y. Lee, MD, MBA, executive director of PHICOR and the CUNY SPH Center for Advanced Technology and Communication in Health (CATCH).

"This includes productivity losses that are hitting businesses around the country and health care costs that are further straining our health care system. These costs could end up trickling down to everyone who pays insurance premiums and taxes."

The computational model simulates a person of a specified age getting infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), having probabilities of developing long COVID, and if long COVID does result, having probabilities of suffering different long COVID symptoms over time.

Each symptom can lead to the person being less productive at school or work and needing different tests, treatments, and visits to clinics, emergency rooms, and hospitals. The model can then track and tabulate the accompanying costs such as productivity losses and health care costs.

Running the model showed that a given long COVID case tended to cost society somewhere in the $5,084 to $11,646 range per year. The vast majority of these costs (around 95%) were productivity losses, with around a quarter of these being from absenteeism and the rest being from presenteeism, wherein employees come to work, but are less productive. Running all the COVID-19 cases to date through the model generated estimates that there are currently 44.69 to 48.04 million long COVID cases in the U.S., which would cost the country $2.01 to $6.56 billion each year.

The vast majority of costs (98.6%) were productivity losses or missed days from work or school and direct medical costs (doctors' appointments, medical care, etc.) comprising 1.04% of total costs. This was based on the assumption that 6% of those with COVID-19 will go on to have long COVID. Studies have suggested that anywhere from 6% to 20% of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 have eventually developed long COVID. Increasing this probability from 6% to 10% results in average total societal costs per year increasing to $3.34 billion.

"We are only now fully understanding the burden of human disease and illness resulting from long COVID," says Peter J. Hotez, MD, Ph.D., professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-author of the study. "As bad as COVID has been in terms of deaths and hospitalizations, it could eventually be matched or even exceeded by the chronic disability from this constellation of sequelae and conditions."

More information: Sarah M Bartsch et al, The Current and Future Burden of Long COVID in the United States, The Journal of Infectious Diseases (2025). DOI: 10.1093/infdis/jiaf030

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