“Long COVID needs to be elevated to a national priority on par with vaccines and antiviral therapeutics.”
That’s one of the determinations of a 136-page report issued by the CDC that hopes to point the way towards what it calls “the next normal” as the United States and the world at-large enters Year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And alongside the goals of vaccinating 85% of Americans against COVID and restoring the public trust in the CDC and other medical bodies entrusted with maintaining public health, the report says that the nation must devise a plan to deal with long COVID, including making those suffering with it eligible for disability benefits.
While “trying to eliminate COVID is not realistic,” the report says, the national infection levels have not yet fallen low enough to reclassify the pandemic as “endemic.” Because of those continued infection rates, the report cautions against “complacency, inaction, or premature triumphalism” as the battle against the disease continues to rage.
But just as emphasis on vaccination rates remains important, the report says research needs to be ramped up regarding how to combat long COVID.
“They need to be recruiting hundreds of thousands of people rapidly, and getting answers in months — not years,” Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, told the Wall Street Journal. Because of this, Emanuel believes the efforts to study long COVID to this point have fallen far below where the research should be.
To that end, the report suggests that the Social Security Administration should make those dealing with long COVID eligible for disability benefits and says the CDC should keep track officially of those cases and set up a long COVID task force.
Emanuel also elaborated on the report’s determination that President Joe Biden’s proposal to issue $22.5 billion in new funding to the fight against COVID is woefully short of what’s needed, saying $100 billion should be spent in 2022 alone, followed by an ongoing expense of $15 billion per year going forward.
“This is a classic situation of where we tend to underinvest, and we tend to move on, and we tend to forget. And that would be a huge mistake,” Emanuel said.
You can see the full CDC report at covidroadmap.org
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