This study is one of four healthtalk.org studies on Covid-19 in the UK.

Covid-19 is an infectious disease caused by a virus known as SARS-CoV-2. Although Covid-19 is the official name of the viral infection, we use the term ‘Covid’ throughout for readability.

Most people who get infected with Covid experience mild to moderate symptoms and illness, or even no symptoms at all. But around the world a large number of people have experienced what has become commonly known as Long Covid. By December 2022, in the UK alone, it has been estimated that around 2.2 million people still have symptoms more than four weeks after getting Covid, and around 1.2 million people still have symptoms more than one year after getting Covid.

In this section you can learn about experiences of Long Covid that our 63 participants told us about, including people affected early in the pandemic when Long Covid was not yet recognised and people living with Long Covid in 2021 and 2022.

All participants were interviewed in 2021 or 2022 via videoconferencing platforms or by phone to comply with any public health restrictions, to minimise any risks of infection and to reduce the burden on participants. Interviewing in this way made it easy for participants to cancel an interview at the last minute if they were feeling unwell or to spread their interview over more than one occasion.

Some were interviewed by public health social scientists Alice Maclean, Ashley Brown and Kate Hunt from the University of Stirling. Others were interviewed as part of our sister study on the impact of long Covid in families and nine interviews were from the ‘Covid-19 in the Community’ study.