In the United Kingdom (UK), there have been over 21.4 million confirmed cases of covid-19 as of April 2022.1 Evidence has emerged that some patients are experiencing long term symptoms and complications that extend beyond the acute infection phase, which is now widely known as long covid.23 According to the most recent UK Government’s Office for National Statistics data (April 2021), approximately 1.7 million individuals in the UK reported experiencing covid-19 symptoms for longer than four weeks.4 Of these, 690% had covid-19 for the first time at least 12 weeks previously, and 45% had covid-19 at least a year ago.4
As the covid-19 pandemic has progressed, there has been increasing evidence that healthcare workers, especially those from ethnic minority backgrounds, may be at particularly high risk of poor physical and mental health outcomes.5 This is likely to be attributed to the many challenges that healthcare workers face while working in these circumstances, including the high work demand, shortage of staff, lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), rapid changes in protocols and guidance, and long working hours, as well as their increased risk of covid-19 infection and severe disease.56 As a result, healthcare workers may also be more likely than the general population to be affected by long covid, with a disproportionate burden among ethnic minorities.
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Source: Amani Al-Oraibi, Katherine Woolf, Laura B Nellums, Carolyn Tarrant, Habib Naqvi, Manish Pareek. Caring for the carers: understanding long covid in our diverse healthcare workforce. BMJ 2022;377:o1152 https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1152.full (Full text)