What is long Covid?

So COVID infection in the main is usually mild and temporary and most people get better. About 5% of people need to come into oxygen because they're more unwell and they need oxygen therapy and they may need to go to intensive care for intubation and ventilation. We now know that people with COVID can develop ongoing symptoms and this is known as long COVID and the latest definition suggests that this is this applies to people who have symptoms about three months or longer outside of COVID. People can present with quite disabling fatigue, breathlessness on exertion, chest pain, headaches, muscle aches and pains, joint pains and sometimes gut symptoms such as diarrhea and ongoing loss of smell and taste. These can be quite disabling for a number of people and significantly impair their quality of life. Because of the track and trace system hasn't been brilliant from the start it's difficult to know how many people actually has this problem but it's been thought maybe 60,000 people in the UK suffer with long COVID.