May 10, 2024 - 10:00am

New research from the Office for National Statistics suggests that just over 3% of people in England and Scotland have self-reported Covid-19 symptoms more than four weeks after a suspected infection. That’s not far off two million people.

It has been suggested this week that such data demonstrate the significant impact that “long Covid” is placing on the economy, both in terms of exacerbating pressure on health services and hitting productivity through high rates of sickness-related absence from work.

Digging into the ONS figures suggests a slightly less alarming picture. For a start, 25% of those reporting long-term symptoms say that it didn’t reduce “at all” their ability to carry out day-to-day activities. Less than 1% of the working-age population report that they have post-Covid symptoms which affect day-to-day activities “a lot”.

Perhaps more importantly, however, these are self-reported symptoms and the ONS does not attempt to test whether Covid-19 is actually a causal factor. As I have previously written, research that compares patients infected with Covid with a control group of uninfected people suggests that many symptoms are equally common in both groups. In other words, much of the self-reported “long Covid” is probably not due to Covid at all.

Of course, Covid may well be a contributing factor in long-term health problems experienced by some patients, but it is important not to overstate the issue and thereby cause unnecessary worry and pressure to respond with unwarranted policy interventions.

A week after the ONS study on post-Covid symptoms was published, another coronavirus-related paper ran in the American Journal of Public Health. For some reason, this paper attracted very little press attention, but its findings are arguably far more significant than those from the ONS.

The researchers, from Syracuse University, examined the impact of Covid restrictions such as stay-at-home orders and business closures on drug deaths using US county-level data. They concluded that lockdowns had “the unintended consequence of increasing drug overdose deaths”.  They attribute this finding to the impact of lockdowns on isolation and mental wellbeing, combined with restricted access to treatment and harm-reduction services.

The effects are statistically significant. For example, the researchers estimate that had all states imposed low-level restrictions similar to those in North Dakota, the US would have suffered 9,300 fewer drug deaths in 2020 alone. Economic support measures are associated with fewer drug deaths, but even the highest level of economic support was not enough to outweigh the negative impacts of lockdown policies on drug deaths.

We know from previous peer-reviewed evidence that lockdowns did not reduce, and may well have increased, overall mortality. We already know that lockdowns had very limited, if any, impact on Covid mortality. This new evidence helps explain one mechanism for how lockdowns increased non-Covid deaths.

The research on drug deaths is part of the growing evidence base showing how the policy response to Covid-19 created devastating consequences for health, wellbeing and the economy, far in excess of any plausible benefits.

It is right that those who are suffering longer-term consequences from a Covid infection receive appropriate care. But how much more important is it that governments across the world learn the lessons of their disastrous policies during Covid? Our priority must be to ensure that unethical and unnecessary lockdowns, business closures and vaccine mandates are never repeated in the event of a future pandemic.


David Paton is a Professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School.

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