When Covid pandemic hit three years ago, it took an unprepared world by surprise, leading to surge in the spread of infection and deaths. As months passed, vaccines were invented to give people protection against coronavirus. But several people, who reported Covid-related severe sickness, complained of injury to internal organs. They also suffered from immune system issues and inflammation. The consequence - long Covid, a phrase for a variety of persistent health issues that a person could experience following a Covid infection. Now, a new research has claimed that the risk of developing long Covid is higher for people who live in poorer areas.
In a paper published in the Royal Society of Medicine, researchers said that the chance of having long Covid is 46 per cent higher for those living in the most deprived areas compared to those living in the least deprived areas.
The research is based on an analysis of the data of more than 200,000 working-age adults from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK to establish a link between long Covid and socioeconomic status across a range of job sectors.
The researchers involved in the study are from universities of Southampton and Oxford. They said in the paper that women had a higher risk of long Covid overall, despite the area they live in. The study said that women in affluent areas are still more likely to develop the condition than men in the most deprived areas.
"Although certain occupational groups, especially frontline and essential workers, have been unequally affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, studies on long Covid and occupation are sparse," Dr Nazrul Islam, of the faculty of medicine at the University of Southampton and Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, said about the research.
"Our findings are consistent with pre-pandemic research on other health conditions, suggesting that workers with lower socioeconomic status have poorer health outcomes and higher premature mortality than those with higher socioeconomic position but a similar occupation. However, the socioeconomic inequality may vary considerably by occupation groups," the lead researcher was quoted as saying by Independent.
The researchers recommended that future health policies take into account factors such as sex, deprivation and occupation when considering how to treat and manage long Covid.
