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NHS may have to care for ‘a million long Covid patients after pandemic’


A leading doctor has said the NHS should expect to treat up to a million people for long Covid in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Long Covid affects about 1 in 10 people of any age infected with coronavirus, and sufferers can experience symptoms including breathlessness, chronic fatigue, brain fog, anxiety and stress for several months after contracting COVID-19.

The likelihood of experiencing long-term symptoms does not appear to be linked to the severity of the initial virus and people with mild symptoms at first can still have debilitating long Covid.

The absence of long Covid registers makes it difficult to measure the scale of the problem, and major studies into the condition are ongoing in an attempt to identify causes and potential treatments.

But one of Britain’s leading doctors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, estimates that about a million people will need care for long Covid as the NHS recovers from the effects of the pandemic.

“Although officially about 4 million people have had Covid, in reality, it’s about 8 million or 9 million,” the anonymous doctor told The Guardian

“If 10% of those people have got something, then it could be almost a million people, and that’s enormous.”

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Source: The Independent, 7 March 2021

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