IMagine is a disease that can render the sufferers of its bedbound for years. The one who can take a marathon runner and leave them unable to walk to the bathroom. Imagine that at least 2 million people in England and Scotland have only been affected to some degree, each with a mix of weakening symptoms, from breathing to brain fog to multi-organs.
Then imagine that there is no proven treatment for life -changing illnesses, remembering a cure. In fact, patients are often told everyone in their heads. Now imagine that many people get sick days together with the virus that causes devastating disabilities -and the following governments have turned away almost every approach to try to get here.
No need to make such a nightmare, of course – it’s true. Five years after the first coronavirus lockdown, the long covid is in many ways of shadow of pandemya. While the season of banners that flashes weekly death on our phones is grateful for a distant memory, the wide swathes of humans are still living with chronic symptoms year after they are first infected with the virus.
And yet you will be forgiven of the long covid thinking is old news, a pandemic relic past next to banana bread and clapping for the NHS. When was the last time you heard a politician speaking the words “long covid”? Or saw calls for research or support for those who suffer to make the front pages? In 2025, the Long Covid was the public health crisis that no one wanted to talk about, to take a wrecking ball in people’s lives, the economy and the health service while the powerful people pretend to be there.
Get treatment. Back in 2020, Boris Johnson’s government promised, in many adventures, that long covid patients will receive specialist assistance in clinics, supported by an additional £ 10m at the local NHS funding. For five years, there are now more than 90 adult post-covid services throughout England to provide diagnosis and rehabilitation for long-term symptoms. But the data only shows a “part” of people with long covids actually received help, with a third of them waiting for more than three months to evaluate after a GP referral. The recent months have seen long covid clinics across the country to close their doors; NHS Cheshire and Merseyside are the latest under the threat, with reports that it is “Finance Can’t Live”. It is not surprising that some patients are returning to costly and non -remedies. When the NHS does not help, desperate people will drain their livelihood to go abroad for “washing blood”.
O Consider accessing disability benefits. A Lancet study in 2021 found that 22% of respondents with long covids were too sick to work, and 45% were at reduced time. And yet, read the news scope of the increasing number of people at work due to long-term illness and lucky to see you even mention coronavirus-just a harsh complaint about “increasing welfare fees” and plans to further disrupt disability benefits.
It’s not like people with long covids who maintain their work are treated better through the system of benefits. In 2023, only 5,224 claimed to pay personal independence (paid to those who are out of work) listed by Long Covid as their basic condition that is disabled – a minuscule amount compared to how many are conditioned. That doctors and nurses who have developed long covids that saving our lives during the blocking are now It has been reported that disabled benefits provide a perspective on how much state can be trusted to be there in our time of need. Calls for a compensation scheme for major workers with long covids, you may not be surprised to hear, repeatedly ignored.
Even children are left to suffer alone. In 2024, more than 110,000 minors aged three to 17 in England and Scotland were estimated to have a long covid, with more than 20,000 of them severely affected. At a time in their lives when they should run around the playground, these kids can hardly cope with the bed. You haven’t heard about coronavirus in the debate in the absence of school. Instead, parents of long covid children were threatened to be taken to court for truancy.
The cost of the person all of this can be pale, of course, but there is also a financial toll for the country. A study that estimated the Long Covid worth the UK economy at least £ 5.7bn to lost productivity from 2022 to 2023, while some economists calculated that the annual health care bill from the disease could be as much as £ 4.2BN in 2030.
Against this backdrop, you would expect ministers to hinder the spread of coronavirus. After all, the best – and maybe, the cheapest – way to deal with the long covid is not to catch the virus in the first place. But in 2022, the final official Covid protection was removed, including the end of most of the free trial. By 2024, the vaccine was severely restrained by a small public proportion. That is despite the facts of the fact that if a person is fully vaccinated and up to date with their boosters, their risk of long covid is lower. This decision has two major consequences: it has become normal for the public to be repeatedly contaminated by the covid and, consequently, to further dangerous to long-term health complications.
When the rules of pandemia were raised, many spoke excited for a “back to normal”. Millions -million people with long covids have not had that privilege. While lucky recovery in time, the worst affected are stuck to their own eternal locking: too sick to go to the pub with married or sit in the office for a career they need to stop. As you read this column, more people get sick with fatigue and pain that will not disappear. If the dice lands are wrong and you or someone you love next, you expect – somehow – there will be help along the way. Long -suffering Covids do not know that not only the dark shadow of pandemya, but the mark of shame.
