As BA.2 subvariant of Omicron rises, lab studies point to signs of severity

The BA.2 virus -- a subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus variant -- isn't just spreading faster than its distant cousin, it may also cause more severe disease and appears capable of thwarting some of the key weapons we have against Covid-19, new research suggests.

New lab experiments from Japan show that BA.2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older variants of Covid-19, including Delta.

And like Omicron, it appears to largely escape the immunity created by vaccines. A booster shot restores protection, making illness after infection about 74% less likely.

BA.2 is also resistant to some treatments, including sotrovimab, the monoclonal antibody that's currently being used against Omicron.

The findings were posted Wednesday as a preprint study on the bioRxiv server, before peer review. Normally, before a study is published in medical journal, it is scrutinized by independent experts. Preprints allow research to be shared more quickly, but they are posted before that additional layer of review.

"It might be, from a human's perspective, a worse virus than BA.1 and might be able to transmit better and cause worse disease," says Dr. Daniel Rhoads, section head of microbiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Rhoads reviewed the study but was not involved in the research.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is keeping close watch on BA.2, said its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

"There is no evidence that the BA.2 lineage is more severe than the BA.1 lineage. CDC continues to monitor variants that are circulating both domestically and internationally," she said Friday. "We will continue to monitor emerging data on disease severity in humans and findings from papers like this conducted in laboratory settings."

BA.2 is highly mutated compared with the original Covid-causing virus that emerged in Wuhan, China. It also has dozens of gene changes that are different from the original Omicron strain, making it as distinct from the most recent pandemic virus as the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants were from each other.

Kei Sato, a researcher at the University of Tokyo who conducted the study, argues that these findings prove that BA.2 should not be considered a type of Omicron and that it needs to be more closely monitored.

"As you may know, BA.2 is called 'stealth Omicron,' " Sato told CNN. That's because it doesn't show up on PCR tests as an S-gene target failure, the way Omicron does. Labs therefore have to take an extra step and sequence the virus to find this variant.

"Establishing a method to detect BA.2 specifically would be the first thing" many countries need to do, he says.

"It looks like we might be looking at a new Greek letter here," agreed Deborah Fuller, a virologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who reviewed the study but was not part of the research.

Mixed real-world data on subvariant's severity

BA.2 has been estimated to be about 30% more contagious than Omicron, according to the World Health Organization. It has been detected in 74 countries and 47 US states.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 4% of Americans with Covid-19 now have infections caused by BA.2, but many other parts of the world have more experience with this variant. It has become dominant in at least 10 other countries: Bangladesh, Brunei, China, Denmark, Guam, India, Montenegro, Nepal, Pakistan and the Philippines, according to World Health Organization's weekly epidemiological report.

However, there's mixed evidence on the severity of BA.2 in the real world. Hospitalizations continue to decline in countries where BA.2 has gained a foothold, like South Africa and the UK. But in Denmark, where BA.2 has become the leading cause of infections, hospitalizations and deaths are rising, according to WHO.

Resistant to monoclonal antibody treatments

The new study found that BA.2 can copy itself in cells more quickly than BA.1, the original version of Omicron. It's also more adept at causing cells to stick together. This allows the virus to create larger clumps of cells, called syncytia, than BA.1. That's concerning because these clumps then become factories for churning out more copies of the virus. Delta was also good at creating syncytia, which is thought to be one reason it was so destructive to the lungs.

When the researchers infected hamsters with BA.2 and BA.1, the animals infected with BA.2 got sicker and had worse lung function. In tissues samples, the lungs of BA.2-infected hamsters had more damage than those infected by BA.1.

Similar to the original Omicron, BA.2 was capable of breaking through antibodies in the blood of people who'd been vaccinated against Covid-19. It was also resistant to the antibodies of people who'd been infected with Covid-19 early in the pandemic, including Alpha and Delta. And BA.2 was almost completely resistant to some monoclonal antibody treatments.

But there was a bright spot: Antibodies in the blood of people who'd recently had Omicron also seemed to have some protection against BA.2, especially if they'd also been vaccinated.

And that raises an important point, Fuller says. Even though BA.2 seems more contagious and pathogenic than Omicron, it may not wind up causing a more devastating wave of Covid-19 infections.

"One of the caveats that we have to think about as we get new variants that might seem more dangerous is the fact that there's two sides to the story," Fuller says.

The virus matters, she says, but as its would-be hosts, so do we.

"Our immune system is evolving as well. And so that's pushing back on things," she said.

Right now, she says, we're in a race against the virus, and the key question is, who's in the lead?

"What we will ultimately want is to have the host be ahead of the virus. In other words, our immunity, be a step ahead of the next variant that comes out, and I don't know that we're quite there yet," she said.

For that reason, Fuller says, she feels like it's not quite time for communities to lift mask mandates.

"Before this thing came out, we were about 10 feet away from the finish line," she said. "Taking off the masks now is not a good idea. It's just going to extend it. Let's get to the finish line."

(Source: CNN)

Your work is not your god: Welcome to the age of the burnout epidemic

The reason why so many of us are at the end of our rope? We allowed work to be what gave our lives meaning.

The rich are irrational when it comes to work. Out of everyone in our society, they have the least need to earn more money, but they work the most.

Billionaire tech-industry titans brag about their hundred-hour work weeks, even though their labor isn’t what boosts their companies’ stock prices and enriches them further. Americans with advanced degrees have the highest average earning power, but typically work more and spend less time on leisure than people with less formal education. The children of rich parents are twice as likely to have summer jobs as poor kids are. And many older American professionals with plenty saved for retirement keep showing up at the office.

I am irrational too. I earned a middle-class salary as a tenured college professor but became increasingly exhausted by and frustrated with the work. Eventually, I quit. Even though teaching played a leading role in my burnout, I felt so aimless without it that, less than two years later, I became a part-time adjunct instructor making just a few thousand dollars a course, a fraction of what I had made before. I needed structure in my days. I needed to exercise my hard-won pedagogical skills. Above all, I needed someone to count on me to show up and do a decent job.

All of this is evidence that we don’t only work for the money. Many people – volunteers, parents and starving artists among them – don’t get paid at all for their labor. Even workers who aren’t rich, who really do need every cent of their paycheck, often say there’s more than money at stake. They’re doing their jobs for love, or service or to contribute to a collective effort.

Worsening labor conditions, including more emotional intensity and less security than mid-20th-century work, only tell half the story of why burnout is so prevalent in our society. Burnout is characteristic of our age because the gap between our shared ideals about work and the reality of our jobs is greater now than it was in the past.

Textile mill workers in Manchester, England, or Lowell, Massachusetts, two centuries ago worked for longer hours than the typical British or American worker today, and they did so in dangerous conditions. They were exhausted, but they did not have the 21st-century psychological condition we call burnout, because they did not believe their work was the path to self-actualization. The ideal that motivates us to work to the point of burnout is the promise that if you work hard, you will live a good life: not just a life of material comfort, but a life of social dignity, moral character and spiritual purpose.

‘According to the modern work ethos, dignity and purpose are available to workers if only they engage with their jobs.’ Photograph: Malte Mueller/Getty Images/fStop

I wanted to be a professor because my own college professors seemed to be living the good life. They were respected, they seemed to be people of good judgment, and their work had the clear and noble purpose of gaining knowledge and passing it on to others. I knew virtually nothing of their lives outside the classroom, or the private demons they battled. Two of my mentors were eventually denied tenure and had to find new jobs. A third died of a heart attack a few years after taking on a major administrative role.

I made no connection between their misfortune and my own career prospects. How could I? I was blinded by my trust in the American promise: if I got the right kind of job, then success and happiness would surely follow.

This promise, however, is mostly false. It’s what the philosopher Plato called a “noble lie”, a myth that justifies the fundamental arrangement of society. Plato taught that if people didn’t believe the lie, then society would fall into chaos. And one particular noble lie gets us to believe in the value of hard work. We labor for our bosses’ profit, but convince ourselves we’re attaining the highest good. We hope the job will deliver on its promise, and hope gets us to put in the extra hours, take on the extra project and live with the lack of a raise or the recognition we need.

Hard work is arguably what American society values most. In a Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2014 that asked people about their personalities, 80% of respondents described themselves as “hardworking”. No other trait drew such a strong positive response, not even “sympathetic” or “accepting of others”. Only 3% said they were lazy, and a statistically insignificant number identified strongly as lazy.

We all know that more than a few of us are genuinely lazy. Think about your co-workers. How many of them are slackers? And how many of them would say they’re anything but? By and large, we aren’t all laboring diligently all day, straining over our reports and sweating through meetings with clients. Rather, we say we’re hardworking because we know we’re supposed to think of ourselves that way.

According to the modern work ethos, dignity, character and purpose are all available to workers if only they engage with their jobs. Employee engagement is also supposedly good for the bottom line. Gallup, which surveys workers on engagement, describes engaged workers in heroic, even saintly terms:

Engaged employees are the best colleagues. They cooperate to build an organization, institution, or agency, and they are behind everything good that happens there. These employees are involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work. They know the scope of their jobs and look for new and better ways to achieve outcomes. They are 100% psychologically committed to their work. And, they are the only people in an organization who create new customers.

“One hundred per cent psychologically committed to their work.” Who is like that?

About a third of US workers are, according to Gallup. To managers who accept the survey’s findings, the two-thirds of workers who are not engaged are a serious problem. One business writer claims that disengaged employees cost employers an additional 34% of their salary through absenteeism and lost productivity. Another describes them as “silent killers”. Gallup warns that unproductive, complacent workers might even be lurking, unnoticed, in upper management. The actively disengaged will even destroy others’ time and accomplishments. “Whatever the engaged do,” Gallup asserts, “the actively disengaged try to undo.” In short, they are villains, bent on undermining our heroes’ mission.

Such rhetoric is not just laughably absurd; it’s also inhumane. The fact is, American workers are more engaged than those in every other rich country, by Gallup’s own measure. Their level of engagement may indeed approach the human limit. (In Norway, the engagement rate is half the level it is in the US, and yet Norwegians are among the richest and happiest populations on earth.)

But here’s another way to look at the issue: a worker who is unengaged with work is not necessarily suffering from burnout. She might simply have found a way to keep her ideals for work in line with the reality of her job, possibly by keeping her expectations for work relatively low. If she is only 80% psychologically committed to the job but is nevertheless reasonably competent, then one has to ask: what’s the problem?

What about those of us who genuinely feel fulfilled by their work? Some of my friends who are doctors, editors and even professors work hard, love their jobs, and flourish. Some professions, such as surgery, seem to promote flourishing more than others. Although all physicians are prone to burnout, surgeons receive not only some of the highest salaries of any workers but also high job satisfaction and high levels of meaning. When they step back and think about what they do, surgeons ought to feel good about their work.

Engagement is not about stepping back, though. It’s about immersion. When performing a procedure, surgeons do work that lends itself to the experience of “flow”. As the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described them, people in flow states shut out the world and their own bodily needs, forgoing food and sleep as they do something that seems good for its own sake. It’s a state of engagement that video game designers try to foster, because it makes the game hard to quit.

Csikszentmihalyi, though, thought flow occurred most readily at work. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi pointed to a welder named Joe Kramer as an example of the “autotelic” personality – that is, someone who readily gets into a flow state at work, which then becomes an end in itself. Though Joe only had a fourth-grade education, he could fix anything in the railroad-car plant where he worked. Joe personally identified with broken equipment in order to repair it. Because Joe made the tasks of his job into an autotelic experience, his life was “more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to life within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot alter.”

Joe’s co-workers all agreed he was irreplaceable. His boss claimed the plant would top the industry if he just had a few more guys like Joe. Despite his rare talent, Joe refused promotions.

The system that gives esteem to engaged employees also creates anxiety only quelled through working more intensively

The promise of greater productivity without greater cost: that’s why engagement and flow are such appealing concepts to management in the postindustrial age. Employees are a liability, according to current business doctrine. 

Hiring another one is risky. So why not see if you can get a little more effort out of the ones you already have? And why not convince them, through surveys and workshops and airport-bookstore bestsellers, that if they commit themselves totally to their jobs, they will be happy? More than that, they will, like Joe Kramer, be numbered among the blessed, the communion of work saints.

In 2022, it is hard for any worker to know if they have the value Joe had to his employer. Good workers can be let go with little warning, if management’s favor turns against them. The system that gives esteem to engaged employees also creates anxiety only quelled through working more intensively. The cure is also the poison. To calm our anxiety, we work too much without adequate reward, without autonomy, without fairness, without human connections, and in conflict with our values. We become exhausted, cynical, and ineffective.

Work anxiety is built into capitalism. That’s a key premise in Max Weber’s 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which still perfectly captures the mindset that sustains our work ethic today. Weber shows how European Protestants created a mode of thinking about money, work and dignity that we, to this day, cannot escape. It is our “iron cage”.

The Protestant ethic, Weber argues, derives from the theology of John Calvin, the sixteenth century Christian reformer noted for his doctrine of predestination, which means God chooses, or “elects”, some people for salvation, with the rest destined for eternal death. Only God knows who has been chosen and who hasn’t, but humans understandably want to find out.

Good works, in Calvinist theology, cannot earn you salvation, but they can be signs of election. That is, God’s elect will perform good works as an outgrowth of their blessed status. So if you are curious about your election, examine your actions. Are they saintly? Or sinful?

To gain assurance of your election, then, you need to know you are being productive, enriching yourself and your community through labor.

Weber saw capitalism as “a monstrous cosmos”. In his view, capitalism was an all-encompassing economic and moral system, one of humanity’s most marvelous constructions. We who live in the system can rarely see it. We take its norms for granted, like the air we breathe. Everything you do, from going to the “right” preschool to laboring in a productive career to receiving medical care on your deathbed, you do because somewhere, someone thinks they can make money from it. The capitalist cosmos imposes a choice on you: adopt its ethic, or accept poverty and scorn.

As an academic, Weber was not involved in industrial commerce. But he was nevertheless as caught in the iron cage as any businessman. Prior to writing The Protestant Ethic, he spent five years dealing with “nervous exhaustion”. He went through several cycles of intense teaching and research, followed by physical and mental collapse, treatments, and leaves of absence to restore him. Then he would go back to work, and inevitably his condition would deteriorate.

His wife, Marianne, later wrote that during this time he was “a chained titan whom evil, envious gods were plaguing”. 

He was irritable and depressed and felt useless; any work, even reading a student’s paper, became an unbearable burden. He ultimately took a two-year leave of absence from his university, after which he resigned and became an adjunct professor, loosely attached to academia, at age 39.

I’m no Weber, but I take personal encouragement from his story. His professional collapse was not the last word. After he quit his job, he undertook his most influential work.

Secular, 21st-century residents of wealthy countries don’t worry much about whether we’re God’s elect. But we’re still trapped in the Calvinist cage. We are anxious to demonstrate to potential employers, and to ourselves, that we are work saints. Like divine election, this type of status is an abstract condition that we cannot assign to ourselves, but one we hope others will recognize.

When our status anxiety wells up, we reach back into our culture’s religious heritage for a balm: hard, disciplined work. For example, Tristen Lee, a millennial-generation British public-relations worker, tells a too-familiar story of how long hours, lack of sleep, no real time off, and excessive rent keep her in the grind. “I throw my absolute heart and soul into” work, she writes. “I am so obsessed with reaching some notable level of success and hitting my financial targets, that I’ve forgotten how to actually enjoy life.” Lee says she feels as if she has “something to prove – but to who?” To herself, Weber would say.

Lee’s experience is the 21st-century echo of 16th-century Calvinist theology. She has internalized the all-seeing judgment of a society that values her only insofar as she works, so she feels a need to assure herself of her worth. 

But there can never be enough assurance; in the present-day work ideology, your accomplishments matter less than your constant effort toward the next accomplishment.

“What is the end result?” Lee asks. “When does the constant agonizing stop? At what point do we reach satisfaction in life and think ‘fuck yeah, I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved and how far I’ve come’?”

Well, never. That’s what it means to be in an iron cage.

(Source: The Guardian)

Where are Britain's missing million workers?

There could be as many as a million missing workers in the UK job market, experts say.

Latest figures suggest that the vast majority of livelihoods survived the end of the furlough scheme, designed to protect the economy from the ravages of Covid.

Fears of a huge spike in unemployment when the support was withdrawn have failed to materialise.

On the contrary: with vacancies at a record high of 1.2 million, many employers are struggling to cope with a shortage of skilled workers.

On Thursday, the government announced plans to get 500,000 jobseekers into jobs by the end of June, with those claiming Universal Credit having to look for jobs outside their chosen field more quickly or face sanctions.

According to the director of the Institute for Employment Studies, Tony Wilson, the problem is that the pandemic has caused the UK labour market to shrink.

"We're seeing unemployment falling, but we're also seeing employment quite a lot lower than it was before the crisis began," he told the BBC.

EPA

So how has that happened?

Well, since the onset of coronavirus, there has been a big rise in the number of people classed as "economically inactive" - that is, people who are not looking for jobs and are not available for work.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reckons that there are 400,000 more people in that category than there were before the virus hit.

Darren Morgan, director of economic statistics at the ONS, says that total "increased sharply" at the beginning of the pandemic, a rise he describes as "understandable".

"If you lost your job then, there was little point in looking for one, given the economy was closed," he told the BBC.

But since then, the number of economically inactive people has proved "far stickier" than the number of people out of work, he adds.

"We have not seen falls like we've seen in unemployment, and this is particularly the case for those over 50," he said.

That, of course, includes some people who have chosen to take early retirement, although others may feel the choice has been made for them.

Recent research by the Resolution Foundation think-tank also suggests that fewer young men are now economically active, perhaps due to fear of illness or suffering with long Covid, while more women have taken up roles due to the rise in flexible working.

Who else is economically inactive?

Tony Wilson of the IES says students are also a factor.

"A lot of young people decided to stay in education instead of entering the labour market a year ago," he said.

"But actually, more recently it's been growing because of longer-term ill-health" - a problem that includes people suffering from the after-effects of the virus known as "long Covid".

"All told, we think because the labour market was growing pretty consistently over the last few decades, the fact that it's now gone into reverse means that this gap, this half a million gap in employment, is even larger when you account for the growth in the labour market that we were seeing," Mr Wilson says.

"We think there's a gap of about a million people between what the labour market would have been like without Covid and where it is now."

Are there other factors?

Many of the labour shortages in particular sectors have been attributed to a decline in the number of foreign workers in the UK.

Because of a combination of Covid and Brexit, many EU nationals who worked in the UK have returned to their countries of origin.

Mr Wilson of the IES believes that the lack of migrant workers is responsible for the one-third of the shortfall in the labour market, while the rise in economic inactivity accounts for the other two-thirds.

Which sectors are worst affected?

Kate Shoesmith, deputy chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), says the run-up to Christmas was "a touch-and-go moment" for many businesses, with Covid and recruitment problems coming together.

"It was a combination of the lowest candidate availability we've ever known and absence rates creeping up," she told the BBC.

Now Covid sickness rates are settling down, but shortages are still "a big sticking point", she says.

She singles out healthcare as one of the worst-affected sectors currently, with the NHS and private providers trying to woo a limited pool of skilled workers amid high demand for services.

"Sometimes the NHS will be paying more to retain staff, because the NHS and the private sector are competing on wages," she says.

Elsewhere in the economy, efforts to address the chronic shortage of lorry drivers have borne fruit, but at the price of attracting people from other sectors, such as fork-lift truck drivers or warehouse workers, she says.

"You have to look at the supply chain as a whole. There's a sense that we're robbing Peter to pay Paul."

And the beleaguered hospitality sector is under renewed pressure to raise wages, while not having had the chance to replenish cash reserves over the festive season because of Plan B Covid restrictions, she adds.

So what's the solution?

Ms Shoesmith says the answer lies in persuading the economically inactive to return to the job market.

But doing it properly, she says, will require a joint effort between the public and private sectors.

Jobcentres and recruitment agencies "working hand in hand" could rebuild the confidence of people who have dropped out of the job market and help them back into work, she adds.

"After the 2007-08 crash, there was a shared sense of purpose, a combined effort," Ms Shoesmith says.

"Jobcentres can get people in, while recruiters can offer deep understanding of a sector," she says. "We've done it before and we can do it again."

(Source: BBC)

Long Covid: 'I have to choose between walking and talking'

 More than a million people in the UK are suffering from long Covid, with fears the number could rise due to the Omicron variant. Many patients say they only had a mild initial infection but it went on to ruin their health, social lives and finances.

Jasmine Hayer, 32, was living in London and training to be a yoga teacher when she caught coronavirus last March.

It sometimes feels like it was a different person, she says, speaking slowly and carefully from her parent's house in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire.

She moved back there last summer when she realised she couldn't even make her bed without becoming breathless.

"This illness is so baffling and no-one really knows how to treat it. I honestly don't know if I will ever get back to full health but I'll never stop trying," she says.

Jasmine Hayer has been contacted by hundreds of patients after starting a blog to raise awareness of long Covid. Jasmine Hayer

Currently on sick pay and previously furloughed, she is desperate to work again.

"My whole life has been pulled out from underneath me like so many others with long Covid. We've had a big identity crisis," she says.

"I need to reinvent myself. I can't even lift my left arm up, let alone be a yoga teacher, which is heartbreaking."

For nine months, doctors said anxiety was the cause of her symptoms, which included a tight chest, heart pain, breathlessness, fatigue and palpitations.

She knew they were wrong and developed her own symptom tracker which helped her work out that her triggers were bending over, walking and talking, with a delayed impact in her lungs.

Her health only began to improve when she started treatment at a clinic for 130 patients with severe long Covid, at the Royal Brompton Hospital, in London.

Doctors found multiple health issues. A gas transfer test showed oxygen levels in her lungs to be 53%, the same as a lung disease patient, and she was diagnosed with post-Covid heart inflammation, which they told her they had not seen before.

They also found small blood clots on her lungs, which only showed up on a specialised scan called a ventilation-perfusion scan.

Since starting blood-thinning medication, the clots have gone but she still has abnormal blood and oxygen flow to her lungs.

"An anti-inflammatory drug called colchicine significantly changed my recovery but unfortunately I relapsed again. Now I can walk slowly for five minutes once a week if I'm lucky but I get chest pain afterwards. I have to choose between using my voice and moving my body. I can't do both in a day.

"Doctors don't know why I have good overall levels of oxygen in my body but it's not getting to my lungs, which could be an issue with my blood vessels, but my scans show they are normal - they've never seen this before."

Since starting a blog about her story, she has been contacted by hundreds of people with long Covid desperate for help.

"Many patients are being dismissed because their GPs and specialists haven't been given enough guidance. They don't know that patients can have micro blood clots but normal scans and blood test results, like me," she says.

Jasmine is closely following an ongoing study in Germany which found microscopic blood clots in long Covid patients, starving their tissues of oxygen. A technique that cleans the blood, removing disease-forming proteins, has helped some patients there.

She is also a patient adviser on the largest long Covid study in the world to date, which aims to improve diagnosis and treatment of the illness.

Prof Amitava Banerjee, from University College London, is leading the two-year STIMULATE-ICP study which will recruit 4,500 patients from six long Covid clinics.

Existing drugs will be trialled to work out their effectiveness, including anti-histamines, such as the hay fever treatment loratadine. Anti-clotting drugs like rivaroxaban and the anti-inflammatory drug colchicine will also be tested.

Cardiologist Prof Banerjee is concerned that the current number of infections will result in more people suffering with long Covid.

Many patients developed it after a mild infection, he says, so he is not reassured that the Omicron variant may produce less severe initial illness.

"We know that people who were not hospitalised with acute Covid have gone on and been more impaired and we should be concerned about that," he says.

Vaccines are undeniably helping prevent death and severe illness but scientists do not know yet if they protect against long Covid, he says.

Many young people with long Covid have not been able to return to work, he adds, and this has had a major impact on their health, wellbeing and the economy.

He believes the best way to prevent it is to "avoid getting infected in the first place and keep the infection rate down", which will not be achieved with a vaccine-only approach, he says.

"I would love to see more consideration, debate and acknowledgement of long Covid from our policy-makers," he says. "If you only measure deaths you miss out the impact on peoples' lives. We should know better than this."

The Department of Health and Social Care has been asked for a response to Prof Banerjee's comments.

What is long Covid?

• Long Covid covers a broad range of symptoms including fatigue, coughs, headaches and muscle pain
• Most people who get coronavirus feel better in a few days or weeks but symptoms can last longer for some, even after a mild infection
• An estimated 1.2 million people reported having long Covid in the UK in the four weeks to October 31
• Women and those aged 35-49 are most likely to report long-term symptoms
• Some 40,000 healthcare workers in the UK are estimated to have long Covid
• NHS England has invested £134m to support those with long Covid and opened 90 dedicated clinics across England

Source: Office for National Statistics/NHS

For Emily Miller, long Covid continues to be a terrifying and lonely experience, without the input of supportive medical specialists.

The 21-year-old had just returned to studying for a music business degree in Brighton last October when she fell ill with coronavirus.

Emily Miller had just returned to studying for her music business degree in Brighton last October when she fell ill with Covid. Emily Miller

Growing up in Oxford, she walked everywhere and enjoyed trips to the theatre. Now she only leaves the house for medical appointments and lessons.

"By the end of my classes, I feel drunk and can't remember what has been said.

"I don't see my friends or have a social life. My life has completely changed and so has my career trajectory."

After an initial mild infection, she started to experience migraines, tinnitus, numbness, breathlessness, dizziness, nose bleeds, chest pain and nausea.

A blood test showed she had a low white blood cell count and she was referred to a long Covid clinic, which helped with fatigue management. She was then referred to a neurologist.

Meanwhile, Emily said a GP told her the symptoms were down to anxiety and she should "go home and sort myself out".

Emily is still on pain medication and suffers from fatigue, muscle spasms and gastrointestinal issues. Her GP recently suggested it was anxiety-related irritable bowel syndrome.

"I would love to have some more tests and investigations to see what is causing this but I keep hitting a brick wall," she says.

Apart from her health, her biggest concerns are financial and she worries about paying her rent every month.

"I applied for a disabled students' allowance but they do not recognise long Covid as a disability. I really hope one day it will be counted," she says.

Her job prospects when she graduates next year are bleak, she feels, and her dream of working for a record label is on hold.

She decided to set up a fundraising page to help support herself and try to ultimately find a cure by paying for experimental treatments like oxygen therapy.

"I hate asking other people to support me but I felt like I was running out of options," she says.

It's a similar situation for Antony Loveless, who recently had to ask his mother to lend him £1,000 to pay his mortgage.

The 54-year-old, who lives in Southend, caught Covid in January while he was at work as a lead investigator at London Gateway port.

His partner Claire Hooper, 52, who was working as a nurse, caught it too and also suffers from long Covid.

They have spent most of this year in bed with crippling pain and fatigue, having both been made redundant from their jobs.

Antony and his partner Claire have lost their jobs and spent most of this year in bed with crippling pain. Antony Loveless 

Antony has lost four stone, walks with a stick and drives a car with a disabled badge. He has been diagnosed with a loss of white blood cells and an autonomic disorder called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which affects his ability to regulate blood pressure. Claire has lost six stone and now has diabetes and hypertension.

Both have been discharged from a long Covid clinic, having been told they were too ill to start rehabilitation.

They burned through £10,000 of savings just paying their mortgage and bills, before they recently qualified for benefits.

"We had an enjoyable middle-class lifestyle," Antony says. "We went from earning around £4,500 a month to living on the bare minimum."

The former war photographer and author has to set reminders on his phone to go to the kitchen to eat but then can't remember why he is in there.

"I hadn't smoked in 37 years and forgot I didn't smoke and bought a packet of cigarettes the other day," he says.

He feels frustrated that statistics are collected on people with Covid who live and die but "not the people in the middle".

"The government never talks about long Covid, you either die or recover, but what about us?"

He says things got so bad a few months ago that he and Claire considered ending their lives.

"We got to a point where we couldn't go on with the pain and no quality of life. We had run out of money and options and were lying in bed, not even able to follow a plot on TV."

Antony says they feel like they have been left floating in the wind.

"We will just keep living and hoping we will get better, that's all we can do," he says.

(Source: BBC)