SPLaT-19_ER

What is this research for?

This research is about Long COVID and COVID-19 in children. ‘Long COVID’ is an illness in which symptoms of COVID-19 infection last at least 4 weeks, such as tiredness, feeling short of breath and having pain.

This is a new study based on an earlier study called SPLaT-19_C

We know that many more people in the UK report having long COVID than is recorded in their general practice records. We think that this is also true for children and young people, but we don’t know this and want to find out.

This new study asks patients involved in the SPLaT-19_C study if we can contact their GP to see if long COVID or COVID-19 has been recorded in their GP records. We will try to link this to their answers to the first questionnaire in the earlier study.

This information will help us understand long COVID in children better and help design services to support them.

Who are we and what will we do

We are a group of doctors and researchers that want to answer questions like:

• Is Long COVID being recorded in the GP records of children?
• Is COVID-19 being recorded in the GP records of children?
• Do persistent symptoms reported by children following COVID-19 match up with GP records of Long COVID?
• Does COVID-19 reported by children match up with the GP records?

Just to clarify this new study is NOT trying to ‘check-up’ on questionnaire responses from the existing study and will not ‘undo’ any of the earlier results. We know for lots of symptoms and diseases there is a difference between what patients tell researchers and what their GP practice has recorded for lots of different reasons and investigating these differences is an important part of research.