Thread by @chrischirp

Quick thread on current Covid situation in England and Long Covid.

I have Thoughts about the Inquiry Report published yesterday but am still trying to organise them.

TLDR: high Covid levels remain, Long Covid remains 1/11

This wave is not over. While the number of admissions with Covid remains lower than the autumn/winter waves, it has now remained highsh for several weeks.

This means there are a lot of people out there getting sick - and having their work, plans and holidays disrupted. 2/11

Scottish wastewater data to 9 July shows a sharp decrease, suggesting that prevalence might be on its way down.

Obviously Scotland and England can have different dynamics, but it’s the best we’ve got as long as England refuses to analyse its own wastwater. 3/11

A new paper on Long Covid (LC) from the US shows the ongoing risk of Long Covid.

CAVEAT 1: their data is most older men. Age/sex strongly associated with LC so can't easily extrapolate results to population. 4/11

CAVEAT 2: they only consider *first* recorded infections - the infection with the highest risk of developing of Long Covid.

Most people have now had Covid at least once, and so again, the results are not directly comparable to the current situation. 5/11

Overall, the chance of developing new Long Covid in unvaccinated people on their first recorded infection reduced from about 10.4% to 7.8% from the original variant to the Omicron variant (that arose in December 2021 and swept the world). 6/11

Being vaccinated reduced your chance of developing LC by about half (to 3.5%) - consistent with previous research on the efficacy of vaccines in preventing LC.

3.5% of vaxxed people developing LC following their 1st Omicron infection still represents a really high number.
7/11

From ONS data, previous infection reduced the chance of new Long Covid by 28%. We don't know how that changes after multiple previous infections.

But even if risk of new LC is now 1-2% that is still high given ongoing waves. 8/11

Covid is not seasonal, and a substantial proportion of the population are getting infected every year.

Even if for most people newly affected it resolves over several months, it still means that every wave leaves tens of thousands people with lingering symptoms. 9/11

Thousands will suffer such severe symptoms that they might be forced out of work or education and lifechanging constraints to their daily activity.

Already almost 400,000 people are severely affected, many for years. 10/11

So, neither Covid nor Long Covid have gone away even if we are far from the situation we were in during the first couple of years of the pandemic. 11/11

PS you can read about this in a bit more detail in my latest post here:
christinapagel.substack.com/p/englands-ong…