More than 100,000 people in the UK could be at risk of developing long Covid in the coming weeks as infections and hospitalisations are rising sharply during the winter months, scientists have warned.
A report in the i newspaper has highlighted that Covid-19 infections have been spiking during the winter, with a 20% jump in daily admissions in the week to 22 December, according to the NHS.
Professor Christina Pagel, a healthcare data scientist at University College London, has extrapolated from the data a range of conservative predictions about how many people may develop long Covid as a result of the current wave.
“I think it will be tens of thousands certainly, but it’s quite possible it will be one to two hundred thousand,” she told the newspaper.
Professor Pagel estimated there is currently a 2% chance of developing long Covid from an infection but that is was only a rough estimate.
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“As to how many new cases will come from this wave, it depends on how many total people are infected. The ONS estimate [for the two biggest waves so far] is that about 30 per cent of population got Covid during the first Omicron BA.1 wave and about 40 per cent got infected in the March/April 2022 BA.2 wave.
“So even assuming only 20 per cent get infected this wave – which I think is too small a number – that would be about 11 million people getting it in England and even a 1 per cent new long Covid rate would be 110,000 people,” Professor Pagel argued.
Her warning has come as, separately, research has highlighted that people with long Covid should not undertake intense exercise as a way of trying to ‘push through’ the condition.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, involved 25 patients with long Covid who reported experiencing malaise after exercising. A further 21 people who had had Covid made a full recovery.
Each participant spent about 10-15 minutes on an exercise bicycle, and blood samples and skeletal muscle biopsies were taken a week before and the day after the task.
Although there was considerable variation between patients, on average people with long Covid had a lower exercise capacity than healthy participants.
The researchers analysed the biopsies taken before exercise and found those with long Covid had a greater proportion of white fibres in their muscles than healthy participants.
The team found signs that the mitochondria in people with long Covid did not work as well as those in healthy participants.
They also found no evidence that “microclots” were blocking blood vessels, as some researchers have argued.
A comparison of the biopsies taken before and after cycling revealed the function of the mitochondria worsened after exercise in those with long Covid, and these participants had far more tissue damage after exercising and signs of the body attempting repairs.
Dr Rob Wüst, an author of the study at Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam, said the findings partly explained why people with long Covid had a lower capacity for exercise.
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“That can explain, for instance, the muscle pain that these patients are experiencing after exercise,” he told the Guardian.
