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Estimating the future burden of Long-COVID in Australia: Submission 300
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Estimating the future burden of Long-COVID in Australia: Submission 300

Valentina Costantino, Damian Honeyman, Adriana Notaras and Raina MacIntyre
Parliament Of Australia
04/2023
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Submission 300: Estimating the future burden of Long-COVID in AustraliaView
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Abstract

Australia faces a growing burden of chronic disease due to SARS-COV-2. This study will be developed in a more detailed format, but is presented here as early data to inform the parliamentary inquiry. Using a mathematical model, we estimated the age-specific burden of Long COVID in Australia to October 2023. The model does not consider re-infections, so is a minimal estimate. The model estimated that with a vaccine-only policy and no other efforts to mitigate transmission, almost all Australians will be infected at least once in the time window from January 2021 to August 2023. The total people with long-COVID by December 2023 is 1,323,482, with 43,910 of these being children 0.4 years of age. This does not include the burden of long-COVID caused by reinfections. Over 3% of the 0–4-year-old age group are estimated to never recover, while almost 1% of 5–19-year-old and over 6% for the population 20+ years old were estimated to never recover. The true burden will be higher than this, as reinfections will add to the burden of Long-COVID. A vaccine plus strategy, which includes increased access to testing, isolation, masks and safe indoor air, will mitigate the continued infection of Australians with SARS-COV-2 and help reduce the long-term burden of long-COVID. Models of long-COVID projections can be used to test the impact of infection prevention and control strategies on future burden of long-COVID.

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