Long covid sufferer warns 'the pandemic isn't over' after her life was transformed

Hundreds of thousands of people have been affected by long covid but it's still widely misunderstood

Covid may seem like a thing of the past for many of us, a nightmare we left behind at the start of the decade, but for some, it never ended. Long covid affects hundreds of thousands of people in the UK, including many who only had a mild case of the virus.

Officially the illness affects about two million people in the UK but some, including researcher Mark Faghy, argue that figure isn't accurate and that the real scale of the problem has been “swept under the rug”. Sarah Barley-McMullen, 54, originally from Derbyshire has been living with the illness since 2021.

After having mild symptoms when she was first diagnosed, she thought she could carry on living like normal. Then she lost her voice and started suffering from hearing loss, chronic fatigue and the inability to cry.

Sarah has had to start using a walker to get around and wears a mask in public to ensure she doesn't catch covid again. Her particular case continues to evolve, with more symptoms that are changing her life year on year.

It all means that Sarah is unable to work at her high-level academic job at the University of Derby. She said: “I was never hospitalised, so I stayed at home because I wasn’t that Ill, but then I never got better. My hearing got worse, I started to lose my voice and I made an appointment with the GP and they said to keep an eye on it.

“It started to severely affect my mental health, I am such an extroverted person and I loved my job but I just couldn't do it. Then after months I got back in touch with the GP and they realised I sounded Ill so they took me in and found I had a partially collapsed lung.

“I was a senior academic and the University of Derby was great, but I found that I had chronic fatigue. For example, I would have a meeting with someone one day and then be completely wiped out the next. It has completely flipped my life upside down.”

Since then Sarah has taken medical retirement and been included in a national study of the condition, working with academics to research and understand it. Sarah has urged the general public to keep testing because covid may still impact vulnerable people.

Professor Mark Faghy, a clinical exercise science expert at the University of Derby, has been working closely with Sarah and a number of other patients. He said: “It's such a broad condition, with over 200 different symptoms so it’s really hard to pinpoint and sum up.

“Unfortunately it’s an inconvenience to people, when you look at the numbers people don’t put that into context, two million people in the UK have this condition, but if you put it into everyday context it is one in thirty. You could fill every single football stadium in the UK with people suffering from long covid. That is the reality but people don’t want to talk about it.

Sarah continued: “I got Covid again in January and it left me with an auto-immune disease, all my joints are painful and I can barely move. People don’t understand that it's a vascular disease, you have mild symptoms like a bad cold or flu but if you have a weakened immune system then it will affect different organs.

"Long covid happens when you ignore covid and don’t rest, you don’t allow your body to catch up and then you develop these conditions. The pandemic is far from over. ”