Healthcare workers with long-term covid who have become incapacitated for work can receive a compensation of 15,000 euros per person. Minister Conny Helder (Long-term Care) says that healthcare staff can receive that amount once. These are people who cared for covid patients in the first corona wave in 2020 and therefore became ill themselves.
One of them is Claudia Ester from Emmen. She worked at the Isala in Zwolle and has been at home for three years now. She has been declared completely incapacitated for work. She is not immediately enthusiastic about the money she receives.
“It’s great that I’m getting 15,000 euros, but I secretly think that that money could be better spent on research into lung covid. Let them free up money to see what’s happening in my body,” she says in a first response.
The money does give Esther financial relief, also because she only has 70 percent of her income. “I can still do very little,” Ester explains. “I sit at home with fatigue and the problem in my head, with concentrating and the brain fog. I just forget about half of the tasks I have to do.”
Especially the uncertainty about her future is difficult for Ester to swallow. “It may sound stupid, but if you have cancer you go into a process and you get chemotherapy or surgery, but with us the doctors just don’t know what to do. We have nowhere to go.”