‘Another unequal burden’: Working with long COVID-19
After graduating in the spring of 2020, Clare Banaszewski landed her dream job as a nurse practitioner in a maternity ward at a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska.
That winter, Banaszewski, 24, contracted the coronavirus. It was a mild case, and she bounced back after two weeks. But it wasn’t long before she started feeling new symptoms: She was overcome with fatigue, struggling to make it through her 12-hour shifts, which used to fly by. She felt heart palpitations, suffered from cognitive problems and had severe headaches — telltale symptoms of a condition known as “long COVID.”
She took three months of medical leave and started back with shortened, six-hour shifts. Even those were too much. Her manager was understanding, but she eventually told Banaszewski that the hospital would need to hire a replacement. Banaszewski resigned six months ago. She has been unemployed since.
“It’s scary,” she said. “I have a lot of student loans I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to pay off. I don’t really have much to fall back on.”
Banaszewski is one of at least 7 million people in the United States, by one estimate, who are unable to work full time or who have had to scale back their work because of long COVID-19, which is defined as when COVID-19 symptoms persist weeks, months or even years after the initial onset of an infection.
Upended careers
Some research has shown that lingering COVID-19 symptoms are more prevalent in people in their 30s and 40s — when workers are often in the prime of their careers. That’s according to a British government study, published last month, that found that the ailment was also most prevalent in women, people living in deprived areas and those working in social care, teaching or health care or having another disability.
“We’ve got to, as a nation, recognize that the majority of people will be of working age, and we need to facilitate these guys working in an environment that allows them to recover while working,” said Fauzia Begum, an occupational health doctor for Britain’s National Health Service. “If you don’t do that, you end up in a position where you have a lot of people who are off work.”
Nisa Malli, a labor researcher who has long COVID-19, said she returned to work too soon and later needed to take off a long period to recover. Malli, who said she feels 90% better two years after contracting the virus, added that she was lucky that her employer allowed her to work remotely and offered a phased return to work.
Other types of workers, however, such as chefs who lost their sense of smell or software developers who could not remember codes they wrote before they were sick, may have to change careers and need support for retraining programs, said Malli, a member of the Patient-led Research Collaborative, a group of long COVID19 patients who are researching the disease.
The key difference between long COVID-19 and other disabilities is that the virus is airborne and transmitted in the workplace and during commutes, Malli said. It is also different because of the numbers of people it has affected.
A study published in January by the Brookings Institution found that long COVID-19 could account for 15% of the millions of unfilled jobs in the U.S.
‘Another unequal burden’
Some countries in Western Europe have robust policies to protect those with disabilities, said Philippa Dunne, one of the authors of a report published by the Solve Long COVID Initiative, a nonprofit research and advocacy group.
In the U.S., however, there are fewer protections. Since people who are unvaccinated may be at a higher risk for developing long COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, companies in regions with low vaccination rates, like the South, may have more worker shortages than those in regions with higher vaccination rates, Dunne said.
“It’s going to be another unequal burden,” Dunne said. “The South already has a much higher rate of people on disability than the Northeast and the Midwest. That also is going to be made worse.”