Long COVID resurfaces in the national dialogue after long absence from the headlines

In early 2025 public health researchers at City University of New York projected Long COVID would cost the U.S. $6.6 billion over three years. This week two members of that research team amplified their findings and updated their projections.

Using AI and computational modeling now as then, they’re currently estimating a three-year price tag of $8 billion—and showing every single case of the condition could set the country back by somewhere between $9,906 and $11,646 per year. 

That low-end figure is up from $5,084 in 2025, and severe or especially persistent cases would cost more. 

“Naturally, the longer that symptoms persist, the higher the total cost,” the researchers state in a fresh look published by The Conversation May 21. 

The upped, $8 billion burden for 2025-2027 conservatively assumes a low Long COVID incidence rate—6%—of all who contract “regular” COVID.  

Evidence-based estimates have placed the Long COVID incidence rate as high as 20% among all who catch COVID.

“This [6%] is likely still a conservative estimate,” they write, “since many who developed Long COVID five to six years ago have continued to have symptoms with no clear end in sight.”

What’s more, add the CUNY Conversation contributors—Bruce Y. Lee, MD, MBA, and Hannah Dimmick, PhD—evidence suggests Long COVID is both underdiagnosed and underreported.

A slippery sickness with sticky symptoms  

The CDC defines Long COVID as “a chronic condition that occurs after SARS-CoV-2 infection and is present for at least 3 months. Long COVID includes a wide range of symptoms or conditions that may improve, worsen or be ongoing.”

The agency points out that Long COVID is not one illness, so there is no one lab test that can definitively classify a person’s symptoms as Long COVID. 

Instead, diagnosing physicians consider Long COVID to be in play based on the patient’s health history, current exam and previous diagnosis of COVID-19. 

Lee and Dimmick note the paucity of media attention to Long COVID in the three years since the pandemic was declared over in May 2023. 

The lack of headlines, they state, “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.”

Meanwhile, the researchers report, a severe shortage of Long COVID treatment clinics means many patients have no good options for managing their illness. 

Long COVID ripe for renewed offensive 

“Despite the lack of preventive options and the need for more answers, the U.S. is moving further away from being able to effectively manage Long COVID,” Lee and Dimmick write.

They cite as an example the Trump administration’s closing of HHS’s Long COVID research operation in 2025. 

“The same year, the National Institutes of Health terminated various funding initiatives for studying potential pathways to and treatments for Long COVID,” Lee and Dimmick note. 

The moves were incongruous with the words of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said on the record that the agency is “driving solutions to diagnose, prevent and treat Long COVID, and we stand with the patients and families whose lives it has disrupted.” 

Time to pin Kennedy down on Long COVID views (and plans)?

Kennedy also pledged to drive a “sustained national effort” to diagnose, prevent and treat Long COVID. 

“By listening to patients and working with advocates and clinicians,” Kennedy added in prepared remarks in September 2025, “we will bring invisible illnesses [like Long COVID] out of the shadows and restore hope to those affected.”

In any case, Lee and Dimmick write, if policy changes are not made, “the number of people with Long COVID is almost certain to grow, and those with persistent Long COVID symptoms could continue to suffer and cost society.”

And in case they don’t have working America’s attention yet, Lee and Dimmick underscore that well more than 90% of Long COVID’s costs are likely to be de facto assessed as productivity losses, hitting employers hard.

Find the 2025 journal study here and this week’s Conversation piece here.