Foreword
Long Covid remains, in many ways, the hidden pandemic.
While 130,000 people in the UK have died from Covid-19 to date, it is estimated that more than 1 million have experienced or continue to experience ongoing symptoms from their original infection, known as Long Covid. As the pandemic continues, these numbers will continue to grow.
The scale of Long Covid means that there are countless individual stories of people affected physically and mentally, but a macro picture also emerges that has a significant impact and implications for the future of our health services and the economy.
The government has made a number of pledges regarding its approach to Long Covid but much work still remains to be done to see if this is effective.
This paper clearly brings out the nature of Long Covid as a global problem, requiring governments around the world to take the right action to respond to it.
The King’s College London/ZOE app collaboration is the largest longitudinal study of Covid symptoms in the world. Through our work, we have also examined the impact of vaccines on existing Covid-19 symptoms and the chance of developing Long Covid. While it is now widely known that double vaccination reduces the chance of getting infected by around 85 per cent, our work indicates that on top of this, vaccines also decrease the likelihood, if someone does get infected, of developing Long Covid by up to 30 per cent.
This has clear implications for the global vaccination policy. The more people are vaccinated, the less chance there is of them getting infected, and when they do get infected, they are more likely to be completely asymptomatic and less likely to get Long Covid.
Vaccinating the world in the coming year is a critical task, not just to avoid excess deaths but to avoid lasting health impacts on those who get the virus.
Tim Spector
Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, King’s College London
Overview
We have written twice previously on the subject of Long Covid – once
to explore the scale of the issue and a second time
to examine the progress made regarding the treatment and support for those with Long Covid in the UK. For both papers we have collaborated with Professor Tim Spector at King’s College London and had access to the data his team has collected together with the health-sciences company ZOE using their COVID Symptom Study app, which tracks symptoms and their duration.
Long Covid remains an acute issue in the UK. It is still poorly understood and has not received an effective response from the government.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated that over the four-week period ending 6 March 2021, 1.1 million people in private households in the UK had Long Covid.
1 That figure will continue to grow over time as more people contract Covid-19. This has a direct impact on people’s physical and mental health, the NHS and the economy.
Long Covid is obviously not just a UK issue but an international one. This paper considers Long Covid from a global perspective and examines the scope of treatment in other countries.
We also look at emerging data and studies on the efficacy of vaccines in helping to mitigate Long Covid. The latest data shared with us by Dr Claire Steves at King’s indicate that while double vaccination reduces the chance of Covid-19 infection in general by around 85 per cent (thus reducing an individual’s risk of Long Covid), vaccination also provides additional protection against Long Covid: even if a vaccinated individual goes on to contract Covid-19, that person’s chances of developing Long Covid are reduced by a further 30 per cent in the most at-risk age group.
Based on the emerging international picture, we argue that vaccinations clearly provide substantial protection from Covid-19 in general and additional protection from Long Covid specifically. Additional emerging evidence suggests that vaccination also alleviates the symptoms of Long Covid. On this basis the data should be articulated and deployed to help tackle the very real issue of vaccine hesitancy around the world, particularly among groups who feel they are less at risk from the virus directly.
We urge the government to increase investment in Long Covid research, especially to deepen investigation into the degree to which vaccinations impact the likelihood of getting Long Covid and alleviate long-standing symptoms for those with pre-vaccination Long Covid
. This research needs to be large in scale and must begin urgently. The UK government should lead a wider call for evidence on Long Covid because the current research is limited to smaller-scale studies, many of which have taken place in the UK.
