From U.S. News & World Report:
... The Social Security Administration has identified about 40,000 disability claims that “include indication of a covid infection at some point,” spokesperson Nicole Tiggemann said. How many people with long covid are among the more than 1 million disability claims awaiting processing by Social Security is unknown.
In recent months, about 5% of new disability claims filed by Allsup, an Illinois-based firm that helps people apply for Social Security, involved people dealing with covid, said T.J. Geist, a director at the firm. Other firms report similar figures. ...
A recent report from the Brookings Institution estimates that 2 million to 4 million people are out of work because of long covid. A study published in September by the National Bureau of Economic Research puts the number at 500,000. ...
By this point I'm sure that the majority of my disability clients have had Covid. That's because the majority of people in this country have had Covid. Merely having had Covid at some point doesn't mean that your disability claim is due to Covid. It's more likely your knee or your multiple sclerosis or something such. Of the few clients I've seen with disability related to Covid, their current diagnosis isn't so much long Covid as post-ICU syndrome, which was well known before Covid. That's post-ICU syndrome as in if you have to spend an extended period of time in the ICU your health may never be the same again regardless of why you were in the ICU so long.
6 comments:
I’ve had one case based on long Covid so far. I’ve had maybe 3-4 cases where long Covid might be an issue (multi-week hospitalization with oxygen dependency on discharge), but the hospitalizations were a month or two before the hearing. I’ve unfortunately seen more claimants die from Covid than have long-term effects or survive extended hospitalizations at this point.
The mental effect of Covid is what will crop up. Same thing happened in 2008 when the economy collapsed. People lost legitimate jobs, got depressed, anxiety and could never recover. However, Covid probably physically will trigger nebulous disorders like chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia.
As always, we won't know until years later. Still, anxiety from this is real.
I didn't have long covid but soon after I had mild covid I had a pulmonary embolism. Hospitalized for 5 days and missed about 2 weeks of work between hospitalization and the many follow up visits. Covid and the possibility of clots go together.
I have had 4 long Covid claims. All women. Won my first one earlier this year for a 32 year old who was treating with one of the first post-covid clinics. None of these clients were hospitalized. Only one had objective findings effecting her lungs. The other 3 were diagnosed with dysautomia/POTS, which can be tested for via a tilt table test. Symptom wise, severe long Covid presents very similarly to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (also a rare post-virus illness). My sense is that Long Covid will have a higher incidence rate compared to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but it will not be a massive source of new disability claims.
These claims are very difficult to win or even diagnosis in most regions in the country. I have to send all my clients to NYC, because very few medical providers outside of major academic hospital systems know what do with these people. This makes it extremely difficult to properly develop the record.
I think with such a large percentage of the population having been infected with covid, we will see higher incidence rates of stroke, blood clots, heart attacks, kidney failure, and autoimmune diseases including diabetes and fibromyalgia/ME.
Whether those will lead to more disability claims remains to be seen: it's possible that they will mostly occur in people older than full retirement age, or be so quickly fatal that people never apply for disability, or be mild enough that they don't stop people from performing SGA or last for at least 12 months.
And then, if there are more claims, it remains to be seen whether SSA awards them and how many levels of appeal it takes. Some things are pretty clear-cut: if someone has to go on dialysis or is in a coma or something. But a lot of the conditions that covid seems to increase the risk of are sometimes but not always disabling--diabetes is a good example of this.
If it helps re: diagnosis, treatment and impact, there now 66 long-COVID clinics across the U.S. based in some very large, well respected hospitals and universities. There's a list here:
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcomes/13-hospitals-health-systems-that-have-launched-post-covid-19-clinics.html
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