A new report from the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) reveals that 24% of COVID-19-related workers’ compensation claims involve the condition known as long COVID.
The report states that while there is “no standardized or universal definition of long COVID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention characterizes it as ‘an umbrella term for the wide range of health consequences that are present four or more weeks after infection with SARS-CoV-2.'”
In October 2021, NCCI published a report with Dr. Michael Choo of Paradigm, which outlined potential disability implications of long COVID on workers’ compensation. The new report, “Long COVID in Workers Compensation: A First Look,” is a follow-up that looks at the preliminary trends and impacts of long COVID in workers’ compensation.
On top of long COVID being involved in 24% of claims, the report also found that:
- 20% of non-hospitalized and 47% of hospitalized COVID-19 workers’ compensation patients developed long COVID
- hospitalized patients who developed long COVID took longer for symptoms to resolve than patients who weren’t admitted to a hospital
- the most common symptoms of long COVID were of a pulmonary or cardiovascular nature
- prescriptions for pulmonary inhalers dominated for both hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients, and
- the average temporary indemnity benefit duration for long COVID patients was about 160 days for hospitalized patients and 95 days for non-hospitalized patients.
Frontline workers experienced brunt of long COVID cases
The report notes that while the pandemic has impacted a wide cross-section of people in the U.S., frontline workers experienced the brunt of work-related COVID-19, and this remains the same for long COVID claims. Healthcare workers and first responders dominated the top 10 long COVID class codes in workers’ compensation cases.
This analysis shows that long COVID claims are impacting the workers’ compensation industry, but “the ultimate consequence or outcome in disability and costs remain uncertain.”
The data used in this report was limited to the first quarter of 2022 and the impact of the more infectious Omicron variant on long COVID in 2022 remains unknown at this time.
