Major £3.4million research project into long Covid to be led by University of Leeds and Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust

The 'LOCOMOTION' research will identify best practice in providing services, ensuring people are supported quickly and receive the right treatments from the right healthcare professionals, in their own home, through their GP or at specialist long Covid clinics.

Long Covid is symptoms such as breathlessness, fatigue, and brain fog that persist for longer than four weeks after contracting coronavirus.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that in July, an estimated 962,000 people in the UK reported symptoms that had existed for more than four weeks.

Nine out of ten of those individuals had symptoms for more than 12 weeks – and four out of ten had experienced symptoms for at least one year.

The research will be led by the University of Leeds and Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust.

It has been funded by the National Institute for Health Research.

The project is jointly led by Dr Manoj Sivan, Associate Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds, Consultant in Rehabilitation Medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust, and Professor Brendan Delaney, a General Practitioner and Chair in Medical Informatics and Decision-Making at Imperial College London.