Estimates of the prevalence of long Covid – where symptoms persist for more than four or more than 12 weeks after infection, depending on the exact definition – vary dramatically.
Before getting to the estimates, what kind of symptoms are we talking about? All of the following have been reported: abdominal pain; cough; diarrhoea; fatigue; fever; headache; loss of taste; loss of smell; myalgia; nausea or vomiting; shortness of breath; and sore throat.
The ONS has documented that almost 14% of people who test positive for COVID-19 continue to report at least one symptom 12 weeks later. This estimate is based on data from the Coronavirus Infection Survey (CIS) – a large, random sample of UK residents living in private households. Here’s the ONS’s chart:
The control participants comprise individuals who took part in the CIS but were unlikely to have been infected. Note that only 2% reported at least one symptom on the relevant date. This seems to suggest that fully 12% of people who test positive for COVID-19 go on to experience long Covid (over and above the background rate).
However, while the CIS is a high-quality sample, the 12% figure isn’t necessarily correct. That’s because the symptoms are self-reported, and we don’t have any information on severity.
Due to the amount of media attention long Covid has received, CIS participants who tested positive might have been inclined to exaggerate their symptoms – to report things they normally wouldn’t have done. In other words, some of their symptoms might be more psychosomatic than physical.
By way of comparison, a study published in Nature Medicine in March of this year gave the percentage of people still reporting symptoms after 12 weeks as only 2.3%. This estimate is based on data from the Covid Symptom Study app, which asks participants to input their symptoms at regular intervals.
In a recent unpublished study, researchers analysed data from several longitudinal surveys, and found that the percentage of people still reporting symptoms after 12 weeks ranged from 7.8% to 17%, depending on the mean age of the sample (with older samples yielding higher estimates).
However, the authors of that study also estimated the prevalence of long Covid in the general population. They examined 1.2 million NHS patients’ electronic health records, and found that only 3,327 had been assigned a long Covid code, which amounts to just 0.3%. This suggests, the authors note, that “only a minority of people with long Covid seek care”.
In another recent study, researchers analysed an even larger sample of patients’ health records (comprising 58 million people) and found that only 23,273 – or 0.04% – had received a long Covid code. The outcome in this study was measured between February of 2020 and April of 2021.
In March of 2021, the ONS estimated the prevalence of long COVID as 1.1 million, or 1.7% of the UK population. This is is 41 times higher than 0.04%. According to the authors, the latter may reflect “under-coding, sub-optimal communication of clinical terms, under-diagnosis, a true low prevalence of long Covid diagnosed by clinicians, or a combination of factors”.
Given the possibility that some people’s long Covid symptoms are psychosomatic, the best way to estimate the condition’s prevalence is to ask people about their symptoms without revealing whether they’ve ever been infected. The true prevalence is then equal to the difference in frequency of symptoms between those who have and haven’t had the virus.
As Will Jones noted back in May, an unpublished German study used this method and found “no statistical difference” between those who were seropositive and those who were seronegative. One caveat is that their sample comprised students aged 14–17, so the results may not be generalisable to the adult population.
Interestingly, a new study based on Swiss data has reached a similar result: 4% of those who were seropositive reported symptoms after 12 weeks, compared to 2% of those who were seronegative – a difference of only 2 percentage points. However, the sample comprised students from primary and secondary school, so the same caveat applies as before.
Overall then, estimates for the prevalence of long Covid range from 0.04% to 1.7% of the population. And estimates of the chance of reporting symptoms after 12 weeks range from less than 1% to almost 12%. Given all the available evidence, I would suggest that those toward the low end are more plausible – especially if we’re talking about something of clinical significance.
This post has been updated.
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What evidence will it take for something negative to be linked to problems with the jabs? Adverse events, higher “cases” and excess deaths all massively up and no link made.
What is there that could make an association?
I think a higher age standardised mortality rate among the vaccinated would be start. As it happens it is more or less the same – slightly higher for the unvaccinated. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland
How do they define “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated” and from where are they getting a count of the “unvaccinated”?
Are unjabbed people with covid (or, in fact, anything) receiving the same treatment in hospital as the jabbed or are they being murdered by an NHS that showed itself perfectly willing to bump-off tens of thousands in spring 2020 to get the numbers up in order to maximise jab take-up?
(One of the clear purposes of the lockdowns was to reduce the quality of life so much for people not terrified of the disease that they’d be willing to be jabbed in order to “get back to normal”. Add the gullible who trust the government, the NHS, their GP and the BBC and you’ve got a very high take-up in the high-trust, high honesty, census-completing indigenous population .)
Post every single stab program the deaths spiked.
The Tards say ‘correlation not causation’ unless you had a fake test and died within 3 years of it then suddenly the cause is Rona.
The carnage from these fascists and their policies includes: 30.000 older people (DNR) murdered during March-May 2020 from midazolam and morphine; 30-40.000? from lockdowns?, 60.000 to 100.000 from the stabbinations with more to come? For the record fewer than 20.000 died from the dreaded Rona over 2 years. Same as the yearly flu deaths.
ONS etc can play all the games they want with the data. Truth will come out.
Interesting reading. As Will Jones has indicated you change the number presentation you can change the interpretation, that stats for you. As an aside, my wife recently had a telephone pre-op (NHS) and was told not to have a covid jab at least six weeks prior to the proposed op. Now why should that be?
Also, Andrew Bridgen asked the Health Minister this week if she would confirm that 2/3 of NHS staff had refused the Autumn 2022 campaign booster. Perhaps they are too busy taking corpses to the morgue. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas
The Government will never investigate the cause/causes of this carnage: they have just bribed Moderna to set up a production facility in the UK and are authorising the MHRA to fast-track UK authorisation for new, poorly tested, experimental jabs based on other authorising bodies’ recommendations (presumably GAVI and the WHO).
They daren’t even hint that they know the jabs are implicated, let alone the primary cause, of the excess deaths.
Why ONS trickery?
They are consistently following the same method of measuring excess deaths i.e. a baseline of the average of the preceding 5 years and they draw attention to the fact that this might be deceptive at this time. What more could you ask for?
Listen to the Andrew Bridgen speech in parliament this week for full, robust explanation
I really don’t understand stats, I barely understand maths.
However, ONS and its global equivalents do seem to be doing a pretty awful job.
Consider this highly complex experiment. Monsanto, say, produce a new veterinarian product for rats called ‘Bright Eyed & Bushy Tailed’. It naturally gets enabled and approved by June’s animal equivalent. A year later quite a lot of rats are peaky, apparently, and some are dead. Could be a number of things. Looks like a job for the ONS.
The Office of National Statistics puts its ‘Bring Your Child To Work Day’ apprentice on to this problem. Firstly, the eager young nipper not unnaturally wishes to exclude the possibility that this wonderful jollop could be responsible for rat suffering. It’s not going to be easy. A bag of 100 rats that were induced to take a shot or more of ‘Bright Eyed & Bushy Tailed’ is brought to the ONS offices. There’s also a bag of 100 rats that did not take this much vaunted elixir.
It’s lucky it was ‘Bring Your Child To Work Day’ and a young Derek begins checking all the rats, using his slide rule to maintain order. He seems to be on top of the method. He’s a bright lad. Open bag number one and count the rats with bright eyes and bushy tails, also check to see if they are all alive or sick. Open bag number two and do the same: are any dead, peaky, bushy or bright? Make a little list.
The most important column is the deaths one. Tot up the number of dead in bag one, and the number of dead in bag two. Easy! Time for elevenses.
Am I missing some significant difficulty that would enable dedicated and professional statisticians from taking this rather complicated method and applying it to the jabbed and unjabbed? Just as a comparison?
Can ‘Bright Eyed & Bushy Tailed’ be excluded as a cause of excess rat deaths and general peakiness. Can Monsanto sigh with relief and continue to stock Pets R Us without further doubts, bringing pleasure to thousands of pet owners and vivisectionists?
You are assuming both bags contain all the rats. However, the bag of unmedicated rats is missing many that are running around outside. As a result the percentage of dead rates in the unmedicated bag is going to be too high.
There is also the likelihood that the bag of rats that didn’t have BEABT also contains rats that became ill or died within 2 weeks of actually being given it, this being how rapid vax injuries were dismissed as not due to being vaxxed by claiming that the vax took time to kill^Wwork.
Am I missing some significant difficulty that would enable dedicated and professional statisticians from taking this rather complicated method and applying it to the jabbed and unjabbed?
Yes I am afraid you are. You don’t say how the rats are selected but if the test is to prove anything then they ought to be selected at random. You can do this for people. A bunch of people volunteer and at random half of them get the jab and the other half get a placebo. Then you follow them for a year or two to see if the death rates are noticeably different. That’s an RCT. It is a valid thing to do but it is not the business of the ONS. The best the ONS can do is an observational study, looking at people have been vaccinated or not and seeing what happened to them. They trouble about that is that the type of people that get vaccinated are different from the type of the people that don’t. So for example unvaccinated people may well be younger and fitter than vaccinated people. The ONS have done this and allowed for differences in age (hence age standardised mortality rate)- this showed no significant difference in death rates. But there may other confounding factors they are not aware of.
Has anyone done such an RCT?
That would be part of the original vaccine trials – only after a time the Pfizer vaccine was proving to be effective so they decided it was not ethical for the participants not to know whether they got the vaccine or the placebo.(This may be true of some or all of the other vaccines). They removed the blinding and very likely many people who got the placebo elected to get vaccinated. This meant that as an RCT it was a limited timescale (I can’t remember how long).
“This meant that as an RCT it was a limited timescale” Therefore no use for assessing whether “vaccination” might lead to increased all cause mortality.
Absolutely. The sad truth is that an RCT that looks at long term effects (over many years) is almost impossible.
Why?
People decide to get vaccinated anyway, the researchers lose track of the subjects but not in a random way, subjects emigrate, the researchers move on and there is no one to sustain it etc.
So how do you suggest we assess whether “vaccines” are doing more harm than good?
RCTs in the short term and observational studies.in the short and long term. Which is what is happening.
Except as you point out, observational studies have their issues – not the least of which is that there is considerable uncertainty as to how many “unvaccinated” people there are. For the trillions that have been spent worldwide on this miracle medicine, which a lot of people were bullied or coerced into taking, to save us from a “deadly pandemic”, very little effort seems to be going into finding out whether it’s been money well spent – especially as many highly “vaccinated” countries have seen higher excess deaths coinciding with “vaccination” campaigns.
Of course they have issues. Many new interventions have similar problems. You can only do your best. I dispute that very little effort is going into assessing the vaccines. Try entering “Covid Vaccine Trials” into Google Scholar.
Can you point me to major observational studies taking place whose objective is to measure “vaccine” impact on public health?
You can start with the ONS data that I have linked to a couple of times already.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland
Here is a couple more creamed off Google Scholar.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14760584.2023.2158816
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14760584.2023.2157817
I am sorry but I going to have to stop this dialogue at this point.
Shame, I was going to point out the Pfizer trial was unblinded March 2021 at which point 21 people had died in the ‘vaccine’ group compared to 17 in the placebo group. The numbers were not large enough to be statistically significant but don’t you think it was imperative every effort was made to continue the trial until statistically significant all cause mortality was available? Especially considering the intention was to inject as many of the global population as possible. Pfizer and the FDA wanted to keep the trial data hidden for 75 years.
I think the first part of your answer is correct, but I am not sure the last part is. As far as I am aware the bias goes the other way, known as the ‘healthy vaccinee effect’. People from ethnic minorities in particular are less likely to be vaccinated than the general population, and these groups tend to have poorer health than the general population. Also people with chronic disease or those close to death are less likely to be vaccinated.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland
Maybe I misinterpret that, but is every (positive…) Covid (test…minus Omicron adjustment… ) death labeled as an excess death now?!
When, as per the graph, we have 10.8k a week dead instead of 10k normally and that little blue Covid dot equals the 349 ‘excess’ Covid deaths, it sure seems so.
The Economist has an article this week about declining life expectancy in the UK preceding Covid, starting from about 2010. It gives the probably causes as obesity, and drug and alcohol misuse (naturally labelled “poverty”). So it would be interesting to see the trends going back to, say, 2000.
The Dutch bean counters have pulled the same trick – the baseline now includes 3 years of corona deaths, pushing it higher.
And yes, it is a trick – the deaths were exceptionally high and could be expected to drop back to somewhere near 2020 levels – hiding the fact they have not is deceitful in the extreme. Particularly when one adds in the fact that the deaths should in fact be trending lower than normal due to the pull-forward effort.
In any event, it’s rather funny – excess deaths were high here through to the beginning of the year, then started dropping and for several weeks had been where expected (on the higher baseline – I found a chart mapping the 5-year period to 2019, 2023 has been well above it) – as of last week they are heading up again. The flu was given as the explanation for the excess deaths to the beginning of the year, but as far as I know neither the flu nor corona are deemed to be rampant right now, so what explains the up trend?
The most positive data on the vaxx is that it provides efficacy for up to 3 months, then starts dropping. At a certain point, 6 months to 9 months post-last dose, people seem to be not only more likely to catch the lurgy, but more likely to get ill. The roll-out in NL started mid-September. Sure I know, all these pesky correlations does not equal causations – whatever it takes to help people sleep at night.
As for Sweden – smart on lockdowns, just as stupid as everyone else on vaxxes.
Apart from the ordinary Bulgarians who are distrustful of the authorities. Bulgaria has not been experiencing excess deaths recently.
What about the least vaxxed counties in the world. What does the data indicate?
Yes, you’re correct I was being eurocentric. Just looking at our World in Data for South Africa: from the last peak of excess deaths on 9th October 22 the percentages are as follows: –
Oct 9 7%
Oct 16 5%
Oct 23 1%
Oct 30 (3)%
Nov 6 (1)%
Nov 13 2%
Nov 20 4%
Nov 27 3%
Dec 4 (1)%
Dec 11 (1)%
Relative up to date data for other African countries doesn’t appear to be available.
Wish we could see mortality rates in young people as any danger signal would be much more pronounced.
You can to an extent with Euromomo data and I think it is: –
https://euromomo.eu
Well-researched speech by Brigden in the HoC today for the debate on mRNA jabs. Not a single person on the opposite benches. Not one. Brigden has been cancelled, unlike Lineker.
The doctors at FLCCC who have treated many vaccine injured say that if someone is going to have an adverse reaction it will happen either within the first two weeks or 5 months after vaccination. This spike is possibly the result of the Autumn booster campaign which started around 5 months ago. The Lockdown Files were government-approved and designed to detract attention away from the true crimes of the past few years.