When Judith first came down with Long Covid, in March 2021, she couldn’t imagine being able to return to her job: a demanding role in business development for a global engineering company. She suffered from fatigue, brain fog and breathlessness so debilitating that she had to ask her parents to care for her and her two children. She counts herself lucky that, about six months later, she was able to resume full-time hours. It was the culmination of a careful increase in activity guided by an occupational health specialist experienced in chronic fatigue, provided by her employer.
“The support kept me restrained from increasing my hours too fast,” says Judith, 43, who did not want her full name published. “I had no experience of this condition — or any idea of what I needed to support me.”
She is one of 2mn people in the UK — about 3 per cent of the population — that the Office for National Statistics estimates is suffering from Long Covid. It defines Long Covid as a strain of the disease in which symptoms persist for more than four weeks, although most sufferers were first infected more than a year ago. For about three quarters of these people, Long Covid symptoms affect their day-to-day activities and, for one-fifth, those abilities are limited significantly.