Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits for the understanding of long-term covid-19 symptoms of contacting people who tested positive for covid-19 four weeks later to ask whether they have returned to baseline health.
The Government, as well as our expert scientific groups, continues to monitor and assess data from a wide variety of sources to better understand the disease course of COVID-19.
In July, the National Health Service launched the ‘Your COVID Recovery’ service to support the recovery of people who have been in hospital or suffered at home with the virus. This is a two-phase endeavour with Phase 1 being available as an open, publicly available site containing general information on all aspects of recovering from COVID-19, including physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing. Phase 2 will be launched this autumn and will be available to people who are assessed and referred by a healthcare professional.
The National Institute for Health Research and UK Research and Innovation have also invested £8.4 million in the Post-HOSPitalisation COVID-19 study (PHOSP-COVID), which seeks to understand why some patients develop longer-term health problems. This is one of the world’s largest comprehensive research studies into the long-term health impacts of COVID-19 on hospitalised patients.