The Political Economy of Long COVID

Long COVID is not just a clinical problem — it is a multi-trillion-dollar drag on labor markets, disability systems, healthcare budgets, and long-run productivity. This report quantifies the economic footprint of post-acute COVID across workforce participation, lost output, disability claims, healthcare utilization, and intergenerational human-capital effects.

It then maps the political-economy stakeholders — payers, employers, insurers, disability programs, federal research agencies — and identifies the policy levers (research funding, disability adjudication standards, employer accommodation rules, therapeutic reimbursement) that most directly change the cost trajectory.

The analysis pairs the mechanistic atlas with extraction-economy methods previously applied to U.S. healthcare to expose where the costs land and who bears them. Open the full report on Fleet for the line-item cost decomposition, stakeholder map, and recommended policy package.