Long Covid Update

With the number of COVID-19 cases in Australia continuing to increase, Long Covid cases are going to continue to grow in Australia.  Based on the UK statistics, current case numbers could lead to up to 100,000 severe Long Covid cases in the Australian population.

This post is a quick update since my full Long Covid post earlier this year.

The UK continues to survey its population every month, asking them whether they have had Long Covid symptoms at least 4 weeks after a suspected or confirmed Covid infection. The numbers do keep going up, in the same pattern, with the latest graph shown here. The latest has 3% of the whole UK population with some degree of symptoms, and 0.6% (or around a fifth of them) have their activity limited a lot by those symptoms.

What does that mean for Australia? To work this out, we have to look at our differences:

• The UK had a lot more infections than Australia pre vaccination. Maybe a third of infections there were before the majority of the population was immunised.
• Both countries are increasingly not counting cases completely – but the UK is possibly missing more cases, as they don’t have a systematic way of capturing the results of rapid antigen tests that were purchased privately. Australia does have reporting in all states, but in both the UK and Australia, there are a lot of disincentives for testing or reporting mild cases for those who don’t want to isolate or restrict their movements. Death rates per reported case in Australia are creeping up (from 0.1% when I looked at it May, to around 0.15% now) which suggests there are fewer cases being reported, as current variants aren’t being reported as more dangerous.
• At the time this survey was done, Australia’s reported Covid-19 infections (from 4 weeks previously – ie the middle of April) were around 10% behind those in the UK.  Australia has since caught up, but Long Covid cases, by definition, take at least 4 weeks to be classified as Long Covid.

With all these caveats, a straight comparison of population numbers between the UK and Australia would give 750,000 Long Covid cases in the population right now, 150,000 of whom would have their activity limited a lot. But that’s too many, because far more  of our population was vaccinated before they caught COVID-19.  Previously, I looked at vaccination and Long Covid.  There is limited information about the likelihood of Long Covid post vaccination, but what there is suggests a reduction in risk by around 40-50%.  That might reduce our Long Covid cases in Australia (if we had the same number of cases as the UK) to around 75,000 severe cases. But our current cases are still being reported at around 40,000 a day, so if reported cases are comparable, we’ll catch up to the UK’s position in about 3 months.

Put all that together, and you get an estimate that if the current rate of daily reported cases of around 30,000 – 50,000 continue in Australia, up to 100,000 people could be suffering severe long COVID (someone whose daily activities are affected a lot, and considered a serious disability) within the next three months.  Another 300,000 people could have some limitations on their daily activity.

Media reflections

I updated this analysis for an ABC article and interview on Long Covid in Australia. The experience reminded me again how difficult it is balancing clarity with accuracy when we are talking about uncertainty. That’s the job of actuaries in all of our work. But it is much harder when the uncertainty is large, and the knowledge gap between actuary and audience is large. The nature of Long Covid, with its wide range of symptoms, levels of impairment and duration, coupled with no definitive clinical test makes it very difficult to put a number on how bad it might be now or might become. And even though everyone in Australia is much more familiar with the numbers around Covid, it is still a bigger knowledge gap than is usual for the professional actuary.

My experience of doing this interview, and a previous one on excess deaths for the Virus gave me a new appreciation for the value of round numbers, analogies and other tricks of the public communicator. Sometimes the answer needs to be a bit more precise than the evidence suggests, with words providing a softening of the level of certainty, otherwise you provide no useful information whatsoever. I have renewed respect for all those numeric professionals who have been providing information to decision makers and especially the public around the pandemic for the last 2 and a half years. Uncertainty means you will always be wrong, but sometimes your information will be useful if you present it effectively.

Life Glimpses

My Covid posting has definitely slowed down since my first post about Covid back before it had a name. So life for me is getting back to whatever normal looks like. But we’re still disrupted. One of our kids came back from a 21st party with Covid, which fortunately didn’t spread to the rest of the family, and possibly even more fortunately, stopped us from going to a beach holiday with friends all of whom ended up infecting each other with Covid and having a very unholiday like school holidays.

I continue to have far more meetings remotely than I would have done pre 2020, and have had lots of conversations where it appears that everyone is calibrating their own personal risk appetite on mask wearing, travel, indoor gathering – everyone has their own risk reward trade-off for each situation.

But winter in Sydney makes me more likely than I expected to throw caution to the winds and eat indoors in a restaurant.

Bit of Beauty

It gave me a bit of a jolt walking through Circular Quay recently to discover this cruise ship docked with the cruise passengers packing out all the nearby cafes. But it was such a beautiful day, I managed to appreciate the beauty rather than worry about Covid.