Long COVID Among Adults With Pre-Existing Disabilities: Evidence From the 2022 National Health Interview Survey

Long COVID is an emerging public health issue that may be disproportionately impacting adults who had disabilities before the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data from the 2022 National Health Interview Survey to conduct multivariate analyses to compare the odds of having Long COVID among four different disability subpopulations and their working-age reference groups: (1) working-age Medicare beneficiaries, (2) single working-age adults without children who were receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and/or Supplemental Security Income (SSI), (3) adults who had disabilities before the age of 22; and (4) adults with Veteran’s Administration disability ratings. We find that people with disabilities who started before the age of 22 had significantly higher odds of ever having Long COVID (odds ratio [ OR ]: 2.030, p = .007) compared to their reference group, holding all else constant. We did not find significant differences in the odds of ever having Long COVID for the other three subpopulations we identified. These findings point to the importance of ensuring that the systems that support the economic security, education, employment, and health care of people with disabilities with an onset before age 22 address this newly emerging concern.