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 20...