More than two years after Georgia Linders first got sick with COVID, her heart still races at random times.
She’s often exhausted. She can’t digest certain foods.
Most days, she runs a fever, and when her temperature gets up past a certain point, her brain feels like goo, she says.
These are commonly reported symptoms of long COVID.
Linders really noticed problems with her brain when she returned to work in the spring and summer of 2020. Her job required her to be on phone calls all day, coordinating with health clinics that service the military. It was a lot of multitasking, something she excelled at before COVID.
After COVID, the brain fog and fatigue slowed her down immensely. In the fall of 2020, she was put on probation. After 30 days, she thought her performance had improved. She’d certainly felt busy.
“But my supervisor brought up my productivity, which was like a quarter of what my coworkers were doing,” she says.
It was demoralizing. Her symptoms worsened. She was given another 90-day probation, but she decided to take medical leave. On June 2, 2021, Linders was terminated.
She filed a discrimination complaint with the government, but it was dismissed. She could have sued but wasn’t making enough money to hire a lawyer.
As the number of people with post-COVID symptoms soars, researchers and the government are trying to get a handle on how big an impact long COVID is having on the U.S. workforce. It’s a pressing question, given the fragile state of the economy. For more than a year, employers have faced staffing problems, with jobs going unfilled month after month.
Now, millions of people may be sidelined from their jobs due to long COVID. Katie Bach, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, drew on survey data from the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Lancet to come up with what she says is a conservative estimate: 4 million full-time equivalent workers out of work because of long COVID.
“That is just a shocking number,” says Bach. “That’s 2.4% of the U.S. working population.”
