Colorado's health department has released devastating estimates of the occurrence of long COVID in the state, and it's affecting as much as 10-11% of the population.
State officials have released their first estimate of how many people in Colorado have been hit by long COVID-19. The figure is staggering: Data suggest that between 230,000 and 650,000 Coloradans may have been affected.
With a state population of nearly 6 million, the data suggest as many as one in 10 Coloradans have experienced long COVID, according to the report from The Office of Saving People Money on Healthcare in the Lt. Governor's Office. And many of them have struggled to find treatments and answers about what can be a life-altering illness.
People with post-COVID conditions can have a wide range of symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog and headaches, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those may be prolonged, lasting weeks, months, or even years after infection.
Some patients described their challenges in a January segment on CPR’s Colorado Matters.
“I think that's what's so unclear about long COVID and potentially concerning about those numbers is that we certainly know some people recover,” but most haven’t, said Dr. Sarah Jolley, a researcher with CU Anshutz. Jolley is also the medical director of the UCHealth Post-COVID Clinic, one site of a national study looking at recovery after COVID.
Jolley said only 30 to 40 percent of long COVID patients have returned to their individual health baseline so far, based on what she’s observed and seen in research.
“There are a number of folks where symptoms persist much longer and so it's hard to estimate what proportion of that 600,000 will have longer-term symptoms versus shorter-term long COVID symptoms,” she said. “I would say the minority of individuals that we've seen have had complete recovery.”
The implications of that are enormous, Jolley said, both in terms of so-called long-haulers’ quality of life as well as Colorado’s workforce, education, health care and other systems.
Jolley said the best protection and prevention against long COVID is getting fully vaccinated, including the latest booster. “We know that vaccination lessens the risk of long COVID, lessens the severity of initial disease,” she said, noting the lagging number of people getting the omicron booster in Colorado. Currently, only about a quarter of eligible people in the state have received the omicron booster, according to the state’s vaccine dashboard, far below the uptake for the initial series of vaccines.
When the best case scenario is "two percent of the population is suffering from debilitating, long-term physical and mental symptoms preventing them from being able to function" then again, we're nowhere near ready to deal with the implications. We're talking millions, maybe tens of millions of Americans disabled by COVID in the months and years ahead.
We're not going to have the resources to deal with that, let alone the second and third-order effects on the economy, society, and health systems.
This is going to be the public health challenge of our generation and we've barely even started to acknowledge it.
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