Early estimates of the number of individuals who suffer from so-called “long-Covid” have been released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), suggesting that it could have impacted more than 150,000 people.
Fatigue, coughs and headaches were the most common complaints, although Covid patients who had been treated in hospital were more likely to suffer serious complications like heart attacks.
Health experts have been struggling to get an exact fix on the number of people suffering from long-Covid – the longer-term health consequences of even mild coronavirus infections – and the ONS said these first estimates are from academic work that is still in its “infancy”.
Health and protection insurers are also grappling with the potential implications of long-Covid, which presents as a range of different symptoms suffered by people weeks or months after being infected, some of whom were not particularly ill with the virus in the first place.
Fatigue is the most common problem, but breathlessness, hearing and eyesight problems, headaches and loss of smell and taste and a cough that will not go away have all been reported by individuals.
Of those who remained in the ONS study, one in 10 still suffered from fatigue (11.5%), a cough (11.4%) or a headache (10.1%) after five weeks.
One in 12 people had loss of taste (8.2%) or loss of smell (7.9%) and one in 20 people had shortness of breath (4.6%).
Britain’s data scientists are working hard to map out the prevalence of long Covid but the process is complicated as individuals can drop out of studies, while the process of getting sample groups of people that represent the broad population is complex.
The ONS said one in 10 people it surveyed who tested positive for Covid-19 still had symptoms 12 weeks later. One in five had symptoms for five weeks or more.
The ONS said the analysis is “very much a work in progress”.