Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what estimate they have made of the number of people in the UK still suffering the effects of Long Covid.

The most recent data from the Winter Covid-19 Infection Study, a joint study carried out by the Office for National Statistics and the UK Health Security Agency, shows that, for the period 6 February 2024 to 7 March 2024, an estimated 2 million people, or 3.3% of the population, in private households in England and Scotland, reported experiencing long COVID symptoms more than four weeks after a COVID-19 infection. Of these, an estimated 1.5 million people reported that day-to-day activity had been limited, of which an estimated 381,000 reported that day-to-day activity had been limited a lot.

Where data was available to calculate the exact duration of long COVID, this showed that an estimated 164,000 people first had, or suspected they had, COVID-19 less than 12 weeks previously, 1.1 million people had symptoms for 12 or more weeks, 930,000 people for at least a year and 670,000 for at least two years. We do not know the exact duration for an estimated 680,980. These results are based on questionnaire responses from 107,852 participants, where weighted percentages from the questionnaire have been applied to the population total in England and Scotland.