Thank you very much, Brendan.
I'm pleased to be able to have this discussion with you. Being a medical doctor and public health specialist, you know that in a pandemic there are eventually a lot more impacts than what we had thought earlier. One of these impacts is long COVID.
I mentioned earlier that the best estimate we have up to now is that between 10% and 30% of those infected with COVID will end up with long COVID. That means having up to 100 different symptoms affecting 10 different vital organs. A large number of these people have to either stop working or significantly reduce their hours of work. The estimate is that about 30% of those people affected need to stop working or stop studying; 70% of them need to reduce their hours of work or are absent. A large number—I think about 30%—will consult health care workers more than 10 times, so you see the impact on the health care system as well. All the human costs, the life costs and the tremendous economic costs obviously add up.
I would be glad to turn, if you want, to Dr. Michael Strong from CIHR. He's on the line and would be very pleased—and it would be very useful—to detail the type of research that CIHR is conducting to understand the nature and the impact of that other pandemic.
Dr. Strong, would you be able to do that?