Two months after contracting COVID-19 and recovering, Beth Wood noticed that she had focused, was easily out of breath and felt unusually tired.
Like three-and-a-half million Canadians, according to Statistics Canada, Wood of Halifax has long-term COVID symptoms.
Wood has worked as a social network for 4 decades.
She told CBC Radio’s Information Morning Nova Scotia that her employer helped her get back to work, but that didn’t work out and she is now collecting a long-term disability pension.
“One of the difficult situations that we have with long COVID is that because there’s not a lot of information about it, it’s not very identified and so most people have to struggle quite a bit to get even a disability,” Wood said.
Wood said she belongs to the Long COVID teams on Facebook and heard that other people hire a lawyer to help them apply for disability.
According to Wood, medical professionals want to learn more about this disease so that other people don’t have to fight to help other people with disabilities.
Dr. Lisa Barrett, an infectious disease specialist and assistant professor at Dalhousie School of Medicine, told Information Morning Nova Scotia that one of the challenging situations in diagnosing the disease is that long COVID “looks very different to a lot of people. “
Barrett said there is still no medical consensus on how to detect long COVID as a disability.
“People obviously can’t behave like they do with other chronic diseases, they want an exemption for them and it’s actually now,” Barrett said.
“The first step is for medical professionals to want to be informed that this exists, that it’s genuine, and that it’s not something made up because other people just don’t want to be at work. “
Justin Pyke, a litigator with Nova Injury Law in Sydney, Nova Scotia, told Information Morning Nova Scotia that long-term insurance is a contractual relationship between the policyholder and the insurer.
He explained that the insured will have to be able to prove that they are unable to work due to illness or a whim of fate in order to meet the definition of the contract.
Describing the lack of a definitive diagnosis for long COVID as a “bit of a hurdle,” Pyke said the insurer will look at all points that affect the insured’s ability to work.
Pyke said that if the insurer denies the claim, the insured will have to rely on a recommendation from a medical professional stating that they are unfit to perform the duties of their job.
With information from Morning Nova Scotia
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