Five years after COVID-19 killed 1 million Americans and more than 6 million people around the world, researchers continue to study COVID and Long COVID, which encompasses many health problems that emerge, persist, or recur following COVID-19, including fatigue, respiratory and neurologic symptoms. Many people continue to have ongoing and lingering impacts from this virus.
Unfortunately, years later and with good medical information, long term disability insurance companies are still pushing back on claims involving Long COVID, treating claimants as if they were malingering. At Newfield Law Group, our decades of experience successfully representing people with Fibromyalgia (FM) and Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) has informed our representation on behalf of people suffering from Long COVID.
Long Term Disability Insurance companies resisted paying FM and ME/CFS claims for years, taking the position that patients were malingering. Over time, a number of objective tests were adopted to reflect the seriousness of these diseases and while still challenging, long term disability insurance companies were compelled to recognize that FM and ME/CFS were in fact disabling conditions.
A similar path is still in process with Long COVID. First, claims were rejected entirely, just as they were with FM and ME/CFS. Newfield Law Group is well positioned to battle with insurance companies based on experience with similar metrics.
We continue to watch the developments in Long COVID as they relate to overall health. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published an update to the RECOVER-Adult Study (the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery) used to create an index of people with symptomatic LC and subtypes of symptoms. The recent update looked at data adding nearly 4,000 additional participants and an expanded questionnaire to the original study of 13,647 adults.
Long COVID continues to take a serious toll on America’s health, wallets, and workplaces. Twenty million Americans have been diagnosed with Long COVID, and one in ten Long COVID patients suffer from five or more symptoms. A recent study from Yale University of 3,500 Long COVID patients included people who were young, vaccinated, and relatively healthy before they got COVID.
Despite this expected healthier cohort, 14% of those surveyed suffer Long COVID.
Long COVID takes many different forms. Symptoms include:
- Post exertional malaise
- Fatigue
- Brain fog
- Dizziness
- Heart palpitations
- Changes in smell and taste
- Thirst
- Chronic cough
- Chest Pain
- Shortness of breath
- Sleep Apnea and/or Insomnia.
If you have been diagnosed with COVID and are suffering from long term effects, filing a disability claim can be overwhelming, and mistakes may be made that will put your claim in jeopardy. To help guide you, we invite you to call Jason Newfield to discuss your situation. He will discuss your situation, giving you the information and guidance to allow you to make an informed decision about your next steps. If you’ve already had your disability claim denied, we urge you to call Jason at 877-406-7883 as soon as possible, as there are strict time limits on appealing claims and there are ways in which he can protect your claim during this process.
