September 21, 2023 — First, the good news. According to Steven Magee, a British engineer and health writer, "Coffee may be a natural treatment for COVID-19." For the other news, we turn to a new report from the Workers' Compensation Research Institute (WCRI), Long COVID in the Workers' Compensation System in 2020 and 2021 (www.wcrinet.org, free to WCRI members). The report is detailed because long COVID is not simple. For example, while the median medical costs for the period studied were about $26K, the cases reviewed (depending on severity) went from a low of a few thousand dollars to a high of over $200K for the most difficult cases involving ICU stays.
Long COVID is a quirky and complex disease, but also very real and potentially debilitating for some patients. If you have encountered (or could encounter) one or more COVID cases in your comp program, you might want to give this report a quick read. Unlike the great majority of the injuries we deal with every day in comp, long COVID has some surprising twists and turns. As Mr. Rogers* told us so many times, "Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else.
*WCRI and Fred Rogers — two impeccable sources.
Author
Dr. Gary Anderberg
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