ALMOST 200 Islanders have sought treatment for long Covid since the pandemic began – and some are still battling a range of debilitating illnesses two years after first contracting the virus.
Jersey’s long-Covid clinic, which opened in the Hospital in February, is receiving an average of ten new referrals each week for people who have been plagued by long-lasting health conditions which, in some cases, have left them unable to work.
The clinic is now treating so many patients that it has been forced to extend its opening times.
Dr Matt Doyle, who leads the clinic, said his team had treated Islanders suffering from an extensive range of conditions, including extreme fatigue, ‘brain fog’, headaches, heart conditions and loss of taste and smell.
And he said there were tentative signs that one of two new Omicron sub-strains, which are responsible for the current wave of infections, could pose a bigger risk for developing long Covid than the earlier offshoots of the highly transmissible variant.
Omicron is, however, less likely to cause long-lasting health conditions than the Alpha and Delta strains.
The sub-strains BA.4 and BA.5 are fuelling a dramatic surge in infections, which has seen the number of known active cases in Jersey soar by 92% between 23 June and last Thursday, when the figure stood at 1,808. There were also 12 active cases in the Hospital and 27 in care homes.
‘The strain of Covid you have had does have an implication in the risk of developing longer-term symptoms,’ said Dr Doyle.
‘With the Alpha strain and Delta strain, we saw a lot more persistent symptoms than we did with Omicron BA.1.
‘Omicron seems to be a little less likely and the emerging science on that seems to be around the spike protein of the virus.
‘We also know there is a significant decrease in risk of developing long Covid in people who are fully vaccinated.
‘However, with BA.4, which has been recently dominant, there has been a little bit of an uplift.
‘We are still within months of this strain arriving, so it is too early to say whether that uplift is significant or whether it is an anomaly.
‘It is also still lower than what we saw with Alpha and Delta,’ he added.
