During Prime Minister’s Questions last week, Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran claimed that up to 400,000 people are currently living with “long Covid” in the UK.

Ms Moran, who also chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on coronavirus, made the same claim in an interview with the Metro and in an interview on LBC.

Figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in December suggest that, among respondents to a UK Coronavirus Infection Survey, about 10% experienced symptoms for at least 12 weeks.

The latest government figures show around 4 million people have tested positive for Covid-19 in the UK since the start of the pandemic. Ms Moran arrived at her figure by applying the aforementioned 10% (of survey respondents who experienced symptoms for 12 weeks or more) to this 4 million figure—which gives you 400,000.

But this is an extremely crude calculation based on very limited data.

Just because someone experienced symptoms for more than 12 weeks last year, it does not necessarily mean they would still be experiencing symptoms now. But, under this calculation, 10% of everyone who had ever tested positive for Covid-19 would still be counted as sufferers of long Covid “right now”.  

The ONS itself told Full Fact it hasn’t attempted to estimate the number of people living with symptoms for 12 weeks or more because it has an insufficient sample size of long Covid sufferers, meaning it would be impossible to make any reliable inferences.

Last week, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail both erroneously reported the findings of a study into vaping and coronavirus transmission—claiming that it increases risk of transmission by 17%.

But this wasn’t what the study actually found.

What it actually said is that so-called “high intensity vapers”—who use e-cigarettes which produce large plumes of vapour—pose an added risk to bystanders of between 5% and 17% in indoor spaces.

But these high-intensity vapers make up the minority of all UK vapers, at only about 10%. For the other 90%, the research found that they posed an increased risk of just 1%.

To put this into context, the paper found that standing near to someone who is merely speaking aloud increases your risk of catching Covid by 40-90%. If that person is also coughing, this increases to about 200%.

A viral Facebook video has cited NHS England data to falsely claim that the Covid-19 survival rate for under-60s in the UK is 99.991%. This is wrong in a number of ways.

In particular, it has calculated the survival rate as the proportion of survivors among all under-60s in the UK.

But survival rates should instead be based on the proportion of survivors among those who have actually caught the virus.

The video also claims that there have been 4,717 Covid-19 deaths of people aged between 0 and 59 in the UK up to 21 January.

But these statistics only cover England—not the whole of the UK. They also only show the number of deaths in hospitals, meaning these numbers do not include people who died at home or in care homes or hospices.

There is currently no single recent source which shows all UK Covid-19 deaths broken down by age. But we do know that in England and Wales alone, more than 7,000 people under 60 have died with Covid-19 mentioned on their death certificate since the start of the pandemic.

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