Analyses of the economic costs and impacts of chronic illnesses like ME/CFS and Long Covid

rvallee

rvallee

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Several analyses of the estimated costs and economic impacts of chronic illnesses like ME/CFS and Long Covid have been published. They all show a heavy economic burden, amounting in the trillions in economic losses, that probably make the strongest argument to convince governments and policymakers that solving them is far cheaper than letting them continue to devastate lives.

This thread is dedicated to listing them for convenience.
 
The OECD has published an analysis of the estimated economic impacts of Long Covid. S4ME thread: The impacts of long COVID across OECD countries.

Highlights include:
  1. Even excluding the direct costs of health care, long COVID is likely costing OECD countries as much as $864 billion - $1.04 trillion USD per year due to reductions in quality of life and labour force participation
  2. Even conservative estimates of long COVID prevalence would indicate that long COVID may be reducing the workforce by nearly 3 million workers across OECD countries, amounting to an economic cost of at least $141 billion USD from lost wages alone. Moreover, even among those who were able to return to the labour force, a significant proportion reported needing to reduce the number of hours they worked, compared to before their infection.
  3. Long COVID is not the first chronic condition faced by countries, and the care and support for people living with long COVID should draw on lessons learned in developing approaches to care for other chronic conditions and post-viral syndromes, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)).
 
The NASEM report on Long Covid includes citations for economic impacts of ME/CFS and Long Covid. Some of those estimates are also found in the 2015 NASEM/IOM report Beyond Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.

Highlights:
  1. As many as 2.5 million people may be living with ME/ CFS, with direct and indirect costs totaling $17–24 billion per year (IOM, 2015)
  2. An estimated 16 million people are experiencing long COVID illnesses nationwide (Bach, 2022b), which will cost the country $544 billion each year, totaling $2.7 trillion over the next 5 years (Cutler and Summers, 2020)
  3. Annual economic burdens of other chronic conditions, such as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome and ME/CFS are estimated to exceed $1 billion and $2 billion in the United States, respectively (Hook et al., 2022; Jason et al., 2008)
 
The Economic Burden Of Covid In The Uk (2023, Cambridge Econometrics)

Using our E3ME macroeconomic model to simulate a Long Covid future, the results suggest that Long Covid may have macroeconomic costs of some £1.5bn of GDP each year, with the impacts increasing if future prevalence were to rise. The main driver of this result is the way in which Long Covid reduces people’s ability to work, leading to lower household incomes and lower economic growth overall. Lower employment of around 138,000 by 2030 follows as a consequence. The pattern of these impacts across the economy reflects a mix of sectors in which more people have Long Covid, leading to reductions in and exits from work; and lower economic activity, which tends to affect market services in an economy such as the UK.
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The review Long COVID science, research and policy, published in Nature Medicine, uses a figure of roughly $1T in annual economic losses, based on a summary of other estimates made by other studies:
On the basis of all the available data, a conservative estimate of the annual global economic toll of long COVID could be around $1 trillion amounting to 1% of the 2024 global GDP154,155,169,170.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03173-6

Good research is expensive. Bad research is extremely expensive.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
The Economist — An incomplete picture: understanding the burden of long Covid (Apr 2024)

Report (PDF)

UK GDP lost $11 billion

View attachment 22957
Click to expand...
That weird. I have a copy of this that states it's $15.5billion. I wonder which one is the latest version

https://impact.economist.com/perspe...understanding_the_burden_of_long_covid_v8.pdf

I got this link from the references in this paper

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03173-6#ref-CR54

Edit: currency corrected to us$

Ref 170
 

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