The quiet $8 billion crisis: long COVID costs keep rising as Washington looks away

Headlines on long COVID have become much more rare than during the first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic. But that doesn’t mean the more than 44 million Americans who have at some point reported long COVID symptoms – a number that continues to grow – are no longer suffering, or that the U.S. isn’t paying for it. Long COVID refers to a condition where at least one of the COVID-19 symptoms, such as fatigue, shortness of breath, and headaches, persists for more than three months. We are artificial intelligence and computational modeling researchers who have been developing and using these methods to aid communications and decision-making in public health. For this study, we worked in a collaborative team of public health and infectious disease experts. Our team’s study, which was published in 2025 in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, estimated that the total economic burden of long COVID will likely exceed US$8 billion between 2025 and the end of 2027. This study entailed developing and running a computational simulation model that represented what might happen to each person after suffering COVID-19, including the risk of that person developing different types of long COVID and the resulting symptoms, healthcare costs and lost-work productivity. Based on our simulations, a single case of long COVID could cost the U.S. an average of between $9,906 and $11,646 annually, with more severe cases costing even more. Productivity losses would account for well over 90% of these costs, which means that employers around the country will be affected. With no cure available, people who have long COVID are left to simply manage the symptoms. Counter/DigitalVision via Getty Images More questions than answers Studies have suggested that somewhere between 6%-20% of people with COVID-19 will go on to develop long COVID. We then used numbers within this range in our model to then calculate the number of people who have developed long COVID, and therefore had probabilities of suffer