Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to (a) his oral statement on covid-19 update on 5 July 2021, Official Report, col 584, and (b) the planned lifting of covid-19 restrictions during increasing covid-19 cases, what recent estimate his Department has made of the number of people projected to suffer from long covid.

As part of NHS England’s ‘Long COVID: the NHS plan for 2021/22’, published on 15 June, a modelling assumption was developed to estimate how many people who have contracted COVID-19 might require follow up in a ‘long’ COVID-19 service. There was clinical consensus that provisionally, approximately 2.9% of people who had COVID-19 would go on to need National Health Service support.

The Plan included an additional £100 million expansion of care for patients with ‘long’ COVID-19 in England. Over £30 million has already been committed to ‘long’ COVID-19 research projects and a further £20 million is available for a further research call.