Join Date: Feb 2011
Posts: 47,749
Thanks: 27,665
Thanked 14,458 Times in 10,262 Posts
|
Young & Old: How Covid19 Still Affects Those Inffected Four Years Later
Young and Old: How The Covid Pandemic Has Affected Every Generation
From children behind on milestones to older people, broader effects are being felt four years after the initial outbreak
The Guardian 21 MAR 2024
The direct effects of the virus have been profound and continue to be felt, including by those with long Covid.
In March 2020, the pandemic closed in like a fog, ushering in a strange new vocabulary, alarming statistics and the fear of illness and death.
In the days before the first national lockdown was ordered, the government’s chief scientific adviser suggested that a “good outcome” would be keeping UK deaths below 20,000, a number that sounded improbably awful at the time, but which has been dwarfed by the 233,791 deaths recorded as of December 2023.
The direct effects of the Covid-19 virus have been profound and continue to be felt, including by those with long Covid. But four years on, the UK is also reeling from the broader health impacts of the pandemic. Babies and children appear to have suffered developmental setbacks due to lengthy periods of isolation.
Access to healthcare continues to be affected. Older people, who needed protecting most from Covid, were also uniquely vulnerable to the effects of physical inactivity. For some individuals, the pandemic prompted a rethink of priorities and provided new opportunities that paved the way for a healthier life.
But as a nation, it delivered a body blow, from which experts say recovery will not be easy or automatic.
Babies and preschool children
Babies born in 2020 emerged into a different world from those born before or afterwards. Even after the newborns left socially distanced hospital wards, grandparents and friends were kept at arm’s length (or farther), play groups and playgrounds were shut and interactions with other children were limited.
“Some of the babies were born quite isolated, they didn’t see many people and most of the faces they saw would’ve been masked,” said Prof Monica Lakhanpaul, a researcher in child health at University College London and a consultant paediatrician. “They weren’t able to engage with other children as much, which affects emotional, physical and social development.”
Official data shows national rates of child development are now lower among two-year-olds than they were in 2018-19, before the pandemic, with more than 80,000 children born in 2020-21 failing to reach one or more of the key measures of progress for their age group.
“We have seen early years children who weren’t physically moving as much. We’re seeing children with speech delay because there was less human interaction,” Lakhanpaul said. “The caveat is that those most affected are those who we were already concerned about.”
This is reflected in widening disparities between local authorities, with nearly 95% of children in Wokingham, Berkshire, meeting developmental targets compared with just 44% of those in Brent, north London. With many health visitor checkups done remotely, or postponed, fewer developmental delays were spotted.
“Developmental milestones are like building blocks. You need the bricks at the bottom to get to the next stage,” said Lakhanpaul. “If everything is delayed, you can’t integrate with society and do all the things you’re meant to do with other children of that age.”
A central purpose of measuring milestones is to prevent, or limit, this onward cascade by targeting interventions effectively. Prof Adam Finn, a paediatric researcher at the University of Bristol, makes a comparison with growth delays during a lengthy childhood illness. “Once they’re better, if you give them the food they need, they don’t just start growing again, they catch up and then they go back to normal,” he said.
The same is true for some other aspects of development, he said, “but you have to do stuff to fix it; it won’t just happen by itself”. The concern is that those interventions are not happening – or not for everyone. “Schools are already working at capacity,” he said.
“The ones that most need it are the least well resourced. The wealthy schools and the wealthy people have already got that and spare.”
In February 2021, at the most intensive phase of the vaccine programme, Sir Simon Stevens, the then head of NHS England, said the country was facing a “dual epidemic” of coronavirus and disinformation, which needed to be fought with “equal vigour”. Some have blamed a lingering “vaccine hesitancy” for the declining uptake of childhood vaccines that is now threatening a resurgence of measles, polio and whooping cough (pertussis) in the UK.
However, Finn, who is also a member of the government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), argues the pandemic has merely exacerbated an ongoing decline, mostly driven by poverty, insecure housing and overstretched NHS services.
“There’s been a steady downward trend in coverage that was already going on before Covid and which has continued to go on since,” he said. “It’s not just down to anti-vaccine, mad internet stuff.”
“The real problem we’ve got is around delivery,” he said. “The truth is that vaccination enjoys majority support that politicians can only dream of – surveys show 95% support. There’s not a big problem with people who don’t like vaccines.”
With sufficient vaccine coverage, herd immunity protects everyone. But some areas, notably central London and the West Midlands, have slipped well below the critical threshold with potentially alarming health consequences that a national vaccine catchup campaign is now racing to avert.
Without improved uptake of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, London could be heading for a measles outbreak of between 40,000 and 160,0000 cases, which would lead to dozens of deaths and thousands of people being hospitalised, the UK Health Security Agency has estimated. A steep rise in cases of whooping cough – 553 were confirmed in England in January, compared with 858 for the whole of 2023 – is also prompting concern.
“We’re seeing diseases that really haven’t been around since the later half of the last century,” Finn said. “We’re now two generations on – nobody remembers them. There’s this false impression that these illnesses don’t need to be worried about.”
Private healthcare has become a “new normal” for sections of society, creating a “two-tier” system for dental care, cataract removal, hip replacements, cancer diagnosis and gynaecology scans. But even within the NHS, different people receive different care.
Long Covid, which has a higher prevalence in people aged between 35 and 69, is a case in point. When the condition first emerged, doctors sometimes noted a stereotype among patients attending new specialist clinics: many were high achievers, thriving professionals, the kind of people who ran marathons at the weekend. Some speculated these people were pushing themselves too hard after being unwell.
Prof Claire Steves, an ageing and health researcher at King’s College London and a consultant geriatrician, has an alternative explanation. “In order to get through the system, you need to have loads of social advantages,” she said. “You probably know about healthcare and are able to bash through the barriers.”
|