Measuring the Cost of COVID in Doctor’s Visits
<p>When I wrote this, February of 2024, 1.2 million people in the United States had died of COVID — a loss of life that exceeds what we saw in World War 2, the so-called “Spanish” flu of 1918, the Civil War, and the entire AIDS epidemic. This story is not about them.</p>
<p>This story is about those who survived. And, given that virtually everyone currently living in the US, with the exception of some of us born very recently, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7222a3.htm" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">has been infected</a>, this is a story about all of us, and the lingering impact the virus has had on the health of the nation.</p>
<p>I’m not <em>really</em> talking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">long covid</a> — which is a distinct syndrome however ambiguously defined. I’ve complained about the <a href="https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/979536" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">lack of a strong case definition before</a>. No, I’m talking about how much health care COVID has caused us to consume — and how much it continues to cause us to consume.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/long-covid-connection/measuring-the-cost-of-covid-in-doctors-visits-3e161055795d"><strong>Website</strong></a></p>