Select a region
A clinic set up last month to support islanders with long covid has already seen more than 40 people and over 100 have been referred by GPs.
Symptoms have reflected the wide range associated with the as-yet unexplained condition, including fatigue, insomnia, dizziness, palpitations, breathing difficulties, bowel issues, loss of smell and taste, and mental health problems.
Jersey also follows a worldwide pattern: with three times as many females suffering from long covid symptoms as men, and most people presenting symptoms being aged 35 to 60.
The clinic, which is held at the outpatients’ department two or three days a week, was launched in early February and is run by Dr Matt Doyle, a GP who also has a specialist interest in allergic disease.
There is a waiting list of four to six weeks to see him.
“The clinic is very much up and running and we’ve had varied presentations, which reflect the variety of symptoms that have been associated with long covid,” he said.
Pictured: There is a waiting list of four to six weeks to see Dr Doyle at the hospital's covid clinic.
“There is much yet to discover about long covid, which is very much an umbrella, description term, but we are helping as much as we can, through medication, through further investigation and through referral on to specialists.
“For some people, we can discharge after one visit, for others, the process is longer. Globally, more research is going on all the time; we are learning new things all the time while other questions, such as the link between the omicron variant and long covid, are yet to be answered.”
Dr Doyle added that the current waiting time was acceptable but if the number of referrals was to increase significantly, the service would review its resourcing.
He said that although the clinic will retain information on patient files, which their GP and Health can access, the data is not feeding into wider long covid studies.
However, the clinic did feed into a wider network of learning and he was travelling to London next week to visit a long covid clinic there.
He added: “To get long covid, you need to first get covid, and the chances of that are greatly reduced if you are fully vaccinated.
“However, vaccine immunity does wane to someone who had their last jab in January will be better protected than someone who had it last March.
“There also appears to be a link between the severity of covid symptoms and the likelihood of suffering from long covid.”
In the latest STAC minutes to be published, from 24 January, there were 352 patients officially recorded as having long covid.
Recently published statistics in the UK reveal that there are 1.5m people there (2.4% of the population) experiencing self-reported long covid, which is defined as symptoms persisting for more than four weeks after the first suspected coronavirus infection that cannot be explained by something else.
In the UK, fatigue continued to be the most common symptom (51% of those with self-reported long covid), followed by shortness of breath (35%), loss of smell (34%), and loss of taste, and difficulty concentrating (both 25%).
In a previous episode of the Bailiwick Podcast, Express spoke to 17-year-old Aliyah Buesnel about the lasting impact of long covid...
Comments
Comments on this story express the views of the commentator only, not Bailiwick Publishing. We are unable to guarantee the accuracy of any of those comments.