CRISIS

2 Million People Have Long COVID in the U.K., Official Figures Show

That’s twice as many as a year ago.

More than 2 million people are living with long COVID in the U.K., according to official figures released Wednesday. That means 3.1 percent of all U.K. residents are suffering from the effects of the virus more than four weeks after first being infected. More worryingly still, two-fifths of those identified (826,000) were infected a year ago and one-fifth (376,000) at least two years ago. The overall number is almost twice as high as the tally reported by the Office of National Statistics a year ago, prompting Prof. Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London. to tell The Guardian that the figures “put to rest any vestige of hope that long COVID would somehow be just a thing of the early waves, would diminish in times of vaccination or ‘milder’ variants, or would just trail off.” he said. The most common symptoms include fatigue, breathlessness, and muscle aches.