Long Covid causes exhaustion, severe fatigue, breathlessness, headaches, muscle aches, joint pain, ‘brain fog’, memory loss, sensation of pressure on the chest, palpitations, diarrhoea, nausea and dramatic mood swings
Prof Tim Spector of King’s College London said the illness behaved like an autoimmune disease, affecting multiple systems even after the virus had gone.
Around one in 50 infected people still have symptoms such as breathlessness and chronic fatigue three months later, according to data gathered from four million patients via an app.
Prof Spector, whose team launched the app with health-science firm Zoe in March, said: “This is the other side of Covid: the long-haulers that could turn out to be a bigger public-health problem than excess deaths from Covid-19.”
An increasing number of sufferers find the virus they thought they had beaten is still affecting their health months on.
