YOU DON’T HAVE TO SHIELD IF YOUR ASTHMA IS MILD

LOTS of my asthma patients are asking me: ‘Should I be shielding?’ The answer is: not necessarily.

Over the past few weeks, the Government has sent out notifications, via letters and text messages, to patients with asthma, advising them to shield. This followed research by Oxford University that showed a further 1.7 million Britons are at risk of severe Covid-19 – on top of those already known to be vulnerable who were advised to shield back in December.

This was done, in part, to bump them up the priority list for a Covid vaccine. But, confusingly, not all asthma patients are considered high risk, which means some will have been told to shield, while another person they know with the condition might not have been.

However, it’s only asthma patients who regularly rely on steroid tablets or have had an attack serious enough to land them in hospital in the past year who need to shield.

People with mild asthma – most patients – have the same Covid risk as a person their age without the condition.