This post has been copied and discussion moved from Germany: ME/CFS Research Foundation The rising cost of Long COVID and ME/CFS in Germany Link to summary webpage Link to full report
According to some quick googling, Germany spends >€500B on healthcare. The €63B on ME/CFS and LC probably includes more than healthcare, but it shows how large of an impact it has.
Interesting. How does this compare to the uk figures we have? Or vice versa if uk was the same as uk what would these numbers translate to for uk? Are they similar or do we still have inconsistencies with how things are grouped?
My hunch as an economist is that the numbers are probably quite similar because the countries are quite similar. But they depend a lot on how you calculate them! Regardless, the bottom line will always be that it’s very, very profitable to invest in trying to solve the problem and trying to prevent the problem in the first place. And that’s really all that should matter.
The Economist estimated Long Covid as costing US $15.4bn and UK GDP as $3.4trn, which, if that's nine and twelve noughts, I think equals c0.45% of GDP. So a much smaller figure even allowing for the omission of any estimate of pre Covid MECFS costs. All we had for that was the admittedly conservative 2016 figure of UK £3.3bn from the counting the cost report , which really needs redoing to reflect the post pandemic situation. That converted to c$4.4bn at today's rate according to Google, which if you just add as is (ignoring inflation duplication and exchange rate issues) coarsely gives 0.58%. But of course I'd be the first to admit that that's not remotely robust or scientific - there's so many inaccuracies of prevalence, scope, definition and methodology that I doubt getting a robust comparable figure is possible (unless a dedicated comparative study was carried out).
Seems like a useful report in collaboration with the company Risklayer which specialises in risk analysis and management. Perhaps useful to create a separate thread to discuss it in more depth? I've tried to make this summary for social media: https://twitter.com/user/status/1922946454454198633 https://bsky.app/profile/mecfsskeptic.bsky.social/post/3lp773eaqsn24 1) This is an interesting economic report that will likely be very useful for advocacy. It estimates the costs of Long Covid and ME/CFS in Germany to be €63.1 billion (1.5% of GDP) in 2024. 2) The report was produced by the ME/CFS Research Foundation and Risklayer, a professional company that does risk analysis and mitigation for governments and large corporations. 3) Let's look at the main results of their model. It estimates that LC cases peaked in 2022 and decreased to a steadier number of around 800,000 thereafter. ME/CFS prevalence rose from 400.000 in 2019 to more than 600,000 cases in 2024, so an increase of around 50%. 4) Data on prevalence of ME/CFS comes from the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV). For a population of approximately 80 million, the pre-pandemic prevalence was around 0.5%, so in line with other estimates. 5) Their estimate for the economic cost (30 billion or ca. 0.7% of GDP for ME/CFS in 2024) are higher than previous ones, but it’s likely that previous ones were underestimates. 6) Table 3 gives a useful comparison. The 2008 Jason et al. estimate is commonly used as a reference but it found a cost of only around 0.15% of GDP which seems quite low. The EUROMENE estimate (Pheby et al. 2020) used €40 billion or around 0.3% of GDP. 7) Here's an overview of the model's assumptions. For Long Covid they seem quite conservative: approximately 10% of COVID-19 cases go on to have persistent symptoms but 80% of those recover within a year. After that first year the recovery is assumed to be 10% for this group. 8) The model assumes that 3.5% of LC patients get ME/CFS within 1 year and ca. 20% of long-term Long Covid patients develops ME/CFS after the first year. This seems like a more reasonable estimate than the 50% of LC = ME/CFS that is sometimes claimed. 9) It is a bit unclear how they calculated the economic impact exactly. If I understand correctly, they used an inability to work for ME/CFS between 31-58% for ME/CFS and 24%-31% for Long Covid. 10) Link to the full report: https://mecfs-research.org/en/costreport-long-covid-and-mecfs/
They have also made their python code public: https://github.com/risklayer/long-covid-mecfs-costs-germany/tree/main/code
