Covid-19
Understanding the facts
the virus symptoms
What is long covid?
The term long COVID merely refers to the fact that patients observe symptoms synonymous with COVID-19 infections for weeks to months beyond recovery from the initial infection. The duration after the infection that long COVID can persist for is not defined and seems to vary based upon a patient-by-patient basis.
Long COVID can manifest as symptoms of breathlessness, fatigue but can link to symptoms that may be less obvious, for instance pins and needles. All of these symptoms are listed upon the NHS website, but what we aim to do here is show how many have exhibited long COVID, based upon NHS data.
Long COVID can occur in a variety of areas within the body as a result of where the infection has spread. As COVID-19 infects the lungs initially, through the ACE2 and COVID-19 spike protein interactions, the bulk of long COVID symptoms manifest as respiratory based symptoms, linking also to the pneumonia that many patients in severe cases exhibit. For further information on this, have a glance over the resources posted in our references tab.
According to information obtained from the NHS, the Office for National Statistics and the Guardian, approximately 376,000 have experienced long COVID symptoms for approximately a year. From an article published by the Guardian on the 4th of June 2021, we can make some curious first glance observations…
If 376,000 people experienced symptoms for over a year, we could, by making a large assumption that if the time frame stems from June 2020 to the end of May 2021 use the following data.
- The number of cases from June 2020- May 2021 was approximately 4,209,095.
- The number of deaths was approximately 89,603 over this time.
- This means that 4,119,492 people recovered from COVID-19 and the 376,000 people who have reported long COVID symptoms make up approximately 9.127% of the COVID-19 survivors.
Now these estimations are extremely rough but are written with the intention of showing how powerful statistics can be in putting the information we hear in the news, into a clearer less overwhelming perspective.
Furthermore...
These statistics show us that the number of people that have died from COVID-19 over this timeframe is approximately 2.128% of those that test positive over the same arbitrary timeframe. Now this doesn’t show us the whole picture, as we have used a specific set of dates, but it does show that many people have recovered from COVID-19 with limited continuing symptoms.
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If our population is approximately 67,000,000 as of the start of 2021, then this means that approximately 6.00% of our population tested positive from COVID-19 over that time frame.
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As well as this, the prevalence of long COVID being 9.127% of the total number of people that have tested positive for COVID-19, shows us that it is present in a relatively small proportion of the population that tested positive for the disease.
What we can take from these figures is that long COVID is prevalent, but most patients that recover from COVID-19 are less likely to experience long COVID symptoms.
Who's most vulnerable?
Health conditions: individuals with pre-existing health conditions as outlined by the NHS may be at greater risk of COVID-19.
Location: individuals in urban or deprived areas are at higher risk of diagnosis and death.
Ethnicity: death rates are highest among black and Asian groups. Pre-existing conditions were not taken into account in these statistics but where they are taken into account this gap reduces. Death rates of individuals born outside of the UK has been increasing in previous years which may aid in explaining this gap.
Sex and Age: analysis by the UK government indicates that death risks increase with age, particularly for males. Working males are twice as likely to die as working females though occupation and pre-existing conditions were not taken into account for this statistic. It should also be noted that females were more likely to get a test than males.
Occupation: the Office for National Statistics has stated that many men whose occupation sees them working in transport, retail, construction, or processing plants and both men and women in social care have seen significantly high rates of death from COVID-19.
Pregnancy: pregnant women are at a higher risk of harm from many diseases. While it is unclear if this is the case for COVID-19, pregnant women have been classified as moderately vulnerable for safety. There has been possible evidence that COVID-19 increases the chances of stillbirth but no evidence it causes miscarriages. The disease can also be passed from mother to baby though most babies have recovered.