LONG COVID: Three years since the UK was put into a lockdown
Boris Johnson made an announcement to the country - ordering people to "stay at home"
Last updated 23rd Mar 2023
Today marks three years since the UK was put into a lockdown.
The Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, made the announcement and ordered people to "stay at home".
Covid-19 has affected millions of people across the world, and according to the NHS: "most people with COVID-19 feel better within a few days or weeks of their first symptoms and make a full recovery within 12 weeks.
But for some people, symptons can last longer. The NHS say this is called "long COVID or post COVID-19 syndrome. Long COVID is a new condition which is still being studied."
Dr Mark Faghy is an associate professor in respiratory Physiology at the University of Derby and has been looking into Long Covid: "My route into helping people with Long Covid stems from the research we were doing prior to the pandemic, which was trying to help people who had pneumonia but struggled to make a recovery and return back to those activities.
"And very soon into the pandemic, we saw those similar trends in patients coming back to us with symptoms.
" We probably didn't realise the magnitude of how big this was going to be."
According to Derby and Derbyshire's Long Covid Clinic - around seven and a half thousand people are currently trying to access their services.
Dr Mark Faghy said: "There is no universal symptom profile of what Long Covid should look like.
That makes providing support for those seven and a half thousand people you, an insurmountable task at the moment."
Dr Mark says it is difficult living with Long Covid: "we have patients who are at home and unable to engage in their pre-pandemic activities and they're seeing their friends, their family and the rest of society effectively, getting back on with their life.
"That creates a big challenge and a frustration for them, living in that space and not having access to the support that they need as well. The challenges seem to come from all different directions."