(CTV News) — Between six and 10 per cent of health-care workers in Quebec have suffered from long COVID since the start of the pandemic, preliminary data released on Thursday revealed at the first Canadian Symposium on long COVID, in Montreal.
A third of them have experienced symptoms deemed “severe,” and more than half of them have been experiencing symptoms for more than a year.
“Overall, post-COVID syndrome has a significant effect on health and the ability to work, and there is a large unmet demand for rehabilitation services,” said the study’s author, Dr. Sara Carazo, who is an epidemiologist at the Quebec Institute of Public Health (INSPQ).
There are some 400,000 health-care workers in Quebec. Around 23,500 of them completed an online survey between May and July 2023, and around 4,000 others were contacted by telephone during the same period. One thousand participants responded both online and by telephone. (…)