Poor women without education least likely to recover from effects of Covid, study finds

Poorer people are less likely to have recovered from the effects of Covid, a new study has found – with those living more advantaged lives more likely to return to full health. 

Poor housing – including living with damp, mould, or vermin – employment, and health care all made somebody more likely to still have symptoms long after having Covid, researchers from King’s College London found in a paper shared with Big Issue. Having a degree and living in a less deprived area, on the other hand, made Covid victims more likely to recover.

Nathan Cheetham, a postdoctoral data scientist at King’s College London, one of the study’s authors, said he hoped the findings could drive a debate over how overall deprivation affects health.

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“Disadvantage at one end and privilege at the other end add up, they accumulate over people’s lives, and they seem to make these big differences in people’s health outcomes, and specifically Covid. We need to try and tackle that,” said Cheetham.

“Some of the government’s focus at the moment is about trying to move towards prevention. My hope is they look a lot at the circumstances in which people live, and not focus as much upon the individual factors like diet and exercise and lifestyle.”

Studies have shown the impact of socioeconomic factors on a person’s likelihood to die from Covid – but Cheetham’s team looked at the impact on recovery and say theirs is the first study to test how multiple factors like housing and employment affect recovery.

Females with the lowest levels of education and the highest levels of deprivation were the least likely to recover, with just 55% recovering, while males with the highest education and lowest levels of deprivation were the most likely to recover, with 80% recovering. The more forms of advantage somebody is exposed to, the more likely they were to recover from Covid.

Healthcare and housing played a role, but so did experience of bereavement during the pandemic and access to social care. Cheetham said the scale of differences surprised him, if not the difference itself.

“You just see these big differences in people’s experiences, their access to care, but also how good they rate their care when they get into the system,” Cheetham told Big Issue. ”That follows the same lines of advantage and disadvantage. That plays a big role in this as well.

“It felt like a lot of focus has been on how people’s health before the pandemic affected what happened to them in terms of Covid and how severe it was. There wasn’t as much focus on the broader circumstances of people’s lives.””

The findings come as Keir Starmer launches a drive to reduce the UK’s benefits bill. The UK has the highest level of working age inactivity due to ill health in western Europe, Starmer’s spokesperson said, adding: “We’re the only major economy whose employment rate hasn’t recovered since the pandemic.”

At least two million people in the UK suffer from long Covid, and the number of working age people not in employment has risen by 700,000 since the start of the pandemic.

Long Covid cases were 50% higher in the country’s most deprived households than in the richest, the ONS found in 2022, with experts saying the trend showed how the virus “compounded” the UK’s existing health inequalities.

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