Health care workers affected by long COVID

Dyddiad y datganiad:
14 November 2022

FOI Ref: FOI/2022/4540

You asked

Please could you provide data on the number of health care workers, if possible, specifically nurses and health care support workers who have been affected by long COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Could this be split into countries e.g. NI, Scotland, England and Wales and broken down by month/ year?

I would also like to understand how many nurses/ health care support workers are currently self-reporting/ diagnosed with long COVID-19.

We said

Thank you for your request.

We publish estimated percentages of people with self-reported long COVID in each sector (where the denominator is the estimated number of people who report working in that sector, obtained from the survey), which can be found in data tables 4-6 of our most recent release. This is accessible via the following links to our bulletin and dataset:

You might consider obtaining a rough estimate of the corresponding totals by multiplying these percentages by official published estimates of the number of people working in different sectors. This data is available via the following links:

However, please note that these published employment totals are based on standard industry/occupation classifications, whereas the sector breakdowns of the percentage of people with self-reported long COVID are based on the sector stated by respondents on the questionnaire. For example, some of those stating that they work in the health care sector may be employed in administrative/managerial positions, pharmaceutical companies, and so on, and this may not be consistent with the sector classifications used in other sources.

This analysis was based on 226,223 responses to our Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey (CIS) collected over the four-week period ending 1 October 2022, weighted to represent people aged 2 years and over living in private households in the UK.

All participants provided responses remotely during the current four-week period. The estimates reported in last month's Prevalence of ongoing symptoms following COVID-19 infection in the UK bulletin were also based on remotely-collected data, however, the estimates reported in September's bulletin were based on a mixture of remote and face-to-face data collection. Estimates in earlier bulletins were based entirely on face-to-face responses. Therefore, these estimates are only fully comparable with those in October's bulletin and not with those in earlier bulletins.

Self-reported long COVID was defined as symptoms persisting for more than four weeks after the first confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infection that were not explained by something else. Parents and carers answered the survey questions on behalf of children aged under 12 years.

The survey questions relating to self-reported long COVID can be found in Section F of the enrolment and Section D of the follow-up CIS questionnaires.

Please note:  Long COVID is an emerging phenomenon that is not yet fully understood. These are Experimental Statistics. The estimates are currently under development, which means that they may change as scientific understanding of long COVID improves. We advise caution when using the data.

For further information, please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk

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