Long Covid ‘could be bigger problem than excess deaths’

THE effects of ‘long Covid’ could turn out to be a bigger public health problem than excess deaths, one of Britain’s leading experts has warned.

Prof Tim Spector, the scientist behind Britain’s symptom- t racking app, warned that the virus behaves like an auto-immune disease in some sufferers, affecting multiple parts of the body.

Those suffering with so-called long Covid have reported breathlessness, chronic fatigue and brain fog months after initially falling ill with the virus.

Prof Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, said their research had found that the effects of the virus lingered for a long time in significant numbers of people.

Researchers from King’s College London and ZOE, the health-science company, tracked data from more than four million people and found that one in 10 sufferers had symptoms of long Covid for a month, with one in 50 still suffering at least three month later.

Long Covid was found to be most common in those of working age, with a median age of 45 among those afflicted, and cases were rare in those above the age of 65 and below 18. Women were more likely to be affected than men.

A report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change today urges the Government to do more to highlight the issue. The authors say they believe awareness campaigns “would help drive compliance with containment measures, such as the use of masks”.

In the report’s foreword, Prof Spector said that in the first few months of the pandemic, little attention was paid to the infected population who were not sick enough to go to hospital, who made up 99 per cent of cases. He said it turned out that Covid-19 was not just a bad flu, but in many people it behaved more like an auto-immune disease, affecting multiple systems in the body.

Researchers learned that “a great many people didn’t get better after two weeks as expected”, Prof Spector said, adding: “We found a significant number still had problems after months.

“This is the other side of Covid: the long-haulers that could turn out to be a bigger public-health problem than excess deaths from Covid-19, which mainly affect the susceptible elderly.”