University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Professor of Law Jasmine Harris recently spoke to Fortune to discuss Long COVID and how this new disability is affecting million of workers and providing a “moment of essential innovation” for employers.
The following is an excerpt from the article:
It’s not every day that a new disability emerges, perhaps permanently altering a large swath of the workforce.
Then again, it’s not every day that a new pathogen bursts onto the scene, killing millions.
For most, there is life after COVID. But for millions of survivors, that life may include disability — an unfamiliar world for them and their employers.
Just how Long COVID is defined depends on whom you talk to, with symptoms and timelines of onset varying. Whatever it is, it may already affect between 7 million and 23 million Americans who previously had the virus — up to 7% of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The silver lining, says University of Pennsylvania law professor Jasmine Harris, is that the nascent condition presents employers with a “moment of essential innovation — rethinking the workplace, both in terms of how we do business and how we come together in a work environment… . ”
Harris is a law and inequality legal scholar with expertise in disability law, antidiscrimination law, and evidence. Her work seeks to address the relationship between law and equality with a focus on law’s capacity to advance social norms of inclusion in the context of disability.