The number of Bristolians thought to have long covid is “frightening”, say health bosses. An estimated 12,580 city residents have the condition, recently described by a support group founder as the “biggest mass disabling event in history”.
It has about 200 different symptoms and affects a disproportionately high number of people who are white, female or of working age, a meeting of Bristol health & wellbeing board was told. Members heard a wide range of services had been developed for sufferers in the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) CCG area and hundreds were on the waiting list, while vaccinated residents were “far less likely” to develop symptoms.
Bristol City Council consultant in public health Sally Hogg said: “Vaccination is, without doubt, the key. If we can get those vaccination rates up, we will be in a better place to deal with long covid.” She said the Office for National Statistics estimated that 1.7million people in the UK had the condition – about 2.7 per cent of the population – which would equate to 12,580 people in Bristol.
Read more: Is Long Covid the biggest mass disability event in history?
Jen Tomkinson, head of specialist services at healthcare provider Sirona, which is running the area’s long covid services in partnership with a wide range of NHS partners, told the meeting: “There is a large proportion of people who report with this. In fact the numbers are frightening – 12,000 people in our area certainly gives me palpitations.
“There is a whole proportion of people who get better and don’t need treatment, and we are focused on those who have reported with it for 12 weeks. We know there are certain groups of people who are more at risk. It seems to be working-age women aged 30-69, people who have another long-term condition such as respiratory or heart disease, people who live in more deprived areas and those who are working in education and health and social care, which is probably more about exposure than anything.”
The board was told two-thirds of people referred were women. She said it was a new, novel disease so they had not known what the symptoms would be, and that it turned out there were about 200 of them.
Half of sufferers experienced fatigue, one-third had either shortness of breath or loss of smell, while one in four described a loss in concentration or their sense of taste. “There are a myriad of symptoms – muscle pain, difficulty with word-finding – but it also has a really large impact on people’s lives, such as finding it hard to exercise, lacking confidence to drive, lacking energy to parent or be a carer if they have children,” she said.
“There is a whole mush of stuff people can present with.” Ms Tomkinson said that when the services were being developed last spring, people with long covid felt like many employers did not believe them.
“So some of the work we’ve done is to make sure it can be recognised,” she told the City Hall meeting on Wednesday, April 20. We have evolved our service as it has gone on and conditions emerged. Sirona runs a single point of access for people.
“We have received 1,400 referrals so far, mostly from primary care. We have a significant waiting list with 400 people.” She said Sirona operated a “front door” service that directed patients to appropriate providers, such as the specialist ME fatigue unit at North Bristol NHS Trust which runs Southmead Hospital.
Read next: The 'strange' Long Covid symptoms people are experiencing six weeks after a postive test
“We have developed some peer support groups, mental health and wellbeing therapies, and we are just developing an agreement for a psychologist to come in. We are working with occupational health providers to look at how we might support people back to work,” she said. “The aims of our service are a lot about enabling people to manage the condition, knowing that we don’t know the trajectory of this.
“There is emerging evidence that people still have symptoms after 12 months, so we are focusing our assessment around self-management. Everyone is presenting with something different so we have to individualise it and take a case manager approach to that and to sign-post into appropriate services that might help them.
“Some people improve and return to work and others are very disabled by it.” She said the reason long covid affected more working-age people those who had retired could be because older residents were vaccinated first.
Ms Tomkinson said the NHS was funding the service on a year-by-year basis which made it “really challenging” to attract senior clinicians with the required breadth of skills because they could only be offered one-year contracts.
