One of the lasting legacies from the Covid pandemic has been the amount of people suffering long term after a Covid infection. Dubbed ‘Long Covid’ the condition involves persistent fatigue, cough, headaches and muscle pain.
An Office for National Statistics (ONS) surgery suggests about one in five people have symptoms five weeks after an initial infection and one in seven after 12 weeks.
Of those suffering with self-reported long Covid, 697,000 first had, or suspected they had, Covid-19 at least 12 weeks previously. This duration extended to beyond six months for 473,000 people, and one year for 70,000 people. Of these 61.6% had experienced at least some limitation to their day-to-day activities, while 17.9% said the lasting effects of Covid-19 had limited their daily activities a lot.
The most prevalent symptoms was fatigue, affecting 11.8% of people five weeks after initial infection. Followed by cough, headache, myalgia (muscle aches and pain), loss of taste and/or smell, sore throat and other symptoms.
Amongst those most likely to be affected were 35-49 years olds, followed by those aged 50-69. Women were more likely to report symptoms, as were those with pre-existing health conditions that limited their activities.
Long Covid symptoms and progression closely matches conditions such as ME, Post-viral fatigue syndrome and Fibromyalgia, conditions which have anecdotally been found to be improved by Oxygen Therapy. Here at Swanley Therapy Centre we have been starting to work with sufferers to hopefully see some improvement in their condition.
For more information please see: