UK 
United States
It crept up in conversation recently with a friend, whose team member is off sick with long covid. “Really,” I said. “That’s Covid-19, right?” My mind whirred back to the pandemic that started almost five years ago. As someone lucky to have escaped the virus symptom free, I have been living in a bubble of having ‘moved on’ - yet the forgotten patients are not as fortunate, and for many the condition is as debilitating to daily life as ever, severely impacting the ability to work effectively, or in the same capacity as they did before the symptoms arose.
The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) Infection Survey gives some insight into the numbers of patients we are referring to. When the pandemic ended in March 2023, there were an estimated 1.7 million people living with symptoms of long Covid lasting at least 12 weeks. Almost a third of these are people who first caught Covid in 2020, and 40% first caught Covid over two years ago. Almost 400 000 people are estimated to have had their daily activities impacted a lot by long Covid. That’s a big number when you look at it, and means that for many employers there are many that are managing employees that suffer from the condition.
HR teams that deploy empathy to long covid sufferers demonstrate care
Alex Makosz is the Founder of K12 Futures a global non-profit community and professional learning network sharing research and learning to improve the future of schools, he knows firsthand the intricacies of dealing with the complexities of long covid both from his personal experience of living with the condition and the extensive time spent in communities of people that have it.
