Maya Gibbon was a busy science teacher at a Brighton secondary school two years ago. Since contracting Covid in the classroom, she has been mostly unable to get out of bed, struggling to adjust to life with a chronic health condition.
Unable to work, and with her husband now acting as her full-time carer, the couple were forced to live in a van for five months last year and are now facing homelessness again.
“This week is my two-year Covid anniversary and I honestly feel like the person I was died two years ago,” Maya says. “I have stopped doing practically everything I did before.”
Antony Loveless and his partner Claire caught the virus in January 2021 and have never recovered. At times, it has affected the couple so badly that Antony has even contemplated taking his own life.
“We had professional lives, we worked 10-12 hours a day, then came home, cooked dinner, did chores, we volunteered,” he says. “Now I struggle to make toast. Our life is in these four walls. We can’t even use our car because we can’t walk the few feet to get to it.”
Saskia Mulder, 41, a deputy ward sister, living in Derry, Northern Ireland, caught Covid after caring for positive patients in March 2020. She also says she has felt suicidal at times.
“I thought I’d be better after a few weeks,” she says. “Two years on I’m still off work, using a stick and have cognitive problems. I’m nowhere near the person I was, my mental health has suffered so much. I’m a strong person, but it’s taken everything.”
We are now told we must “live with” Covid. Yet for 1.5 million people with Long Covid, life over the last two years has changed unrecognisably – with very little support.
Many of these people were key workers who had to work while the rest of Britain kept safe. Many in the public sector were betrayed by the Government’s failure on PPE. Yet, like the Covid bereaved, these people are now in danger of being forgotten by a government in whose interests it is to move on as quickly as possible from the virus.
Today, in a moving debate called in Parliament, Layla Moran MP, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus, told those with Long Covid: “We hear you. You have not been forgotten. And we continue to fight for you.”
As well as a public health emergency, Moran warned of a “looming crisis ahead” for the economy with 2.4% of the population affected. “Public sector workers gave their lives,” she said. “When we were all allowed to be at home, they went in, and, according to the Office for National Statistics, are the ones who have the highest prevalence of Long Covid. I do believe we owe them so much more.”
Labour MP Debbie Abrahams spoke about her own experience of Long Covid, including “prolonged fatigue and nasty bouts of nausea,” as well as “worsened arthritis, pain that is sometimes completely debilitating”.
She raised the plight of 34,000 children with Long Covid as well as that of frontline workers and people in deprived communities more associated with the condition. “This Covid pandemic is far from over,” she told the House.
The APPG reports that the UK government has “continuously failed” to take Long Covid into account and has not “adequately funded” research into treatment. Antony Loveless goes further. “They have blood on their hands,” he says. “They are wilfully ignoring it. I had to sit and listen to Rishi Sunak talking about writing off £4.3billion of fraudulent business loans when there’s only £20million put forward to Long Covid support. It’s loose change to them, isn’t it?”
While Downing Street partied, Maya Gibbon has been living a new life of chronic illness and hospital appointments. She has had four hospital admissions, two operations, more than 300 blood tests, eight MRIs, 13 CT scans, two lumbar punctures, 15 ultrasounds, one colonoscopy, and multiple ECGs.
She’s had thunderclap headaches that make her black out, and kidney stones caused by her medication. She can count the number of walks she has taken on the fingers of her hands.
“I miss work so much,” she says. “And I am absolutely filled with dread about all the cost of living increases coming.”
Saskia Mulder says her experience has opened her eyes “to the way people with health conditions are treated. I always saw it as the nurse, now it’s as a patient. At one point I was suicidal… I do want to go back to work because if you don’t have hope, what have you got? But a lot of nurses are being told to retire on grounds of ill health.”
Antony’s partner Claire, 52, is too exhausted to speak to us. She is about to have her contract with the NHS terminated, after being off sick for the last 15 months.
Antony, 54, an author and a former investigator at the London Gateway Port lost his own job last year. “We had savings, but they went,” he says. “Now we’re surviving on benefits. I’ve lost four stone and Claire has lost six-and-a-half stone. We’re disabled now and it’s been a struggle to accept that.”
Last year, Antony planned to take his own life. “I hit rock bottom last summer,” he says. “I said to Claire, ‘I’ve got nothing left. I want to end my life’.” He says support from community groups and counselling saved him.
Maya looks back over the last two years. “I wish I would have known that it would have been so divisive,” she says. “That people would have denied it existed, denied it was bad and laughed at the thing that had changed your life.
“I wish that I would have known that the country would have listened to politicians as opposed to scientists and doctors of infectious diseases.”
Saskia Mulder has a question for the Government. “They clapped for us when we were on the front line, but now what?” she asks.
