Opinion: Welcoming NHS Forth Valley's Long Covid team

But it is more predominant among social care workers, women, and those living in more deprived communities. It is real and the people who live with it feel totally failed.

That was the message I took away from a meeting I had last week in Brightons with the Falkirk Long Covid Support Group. Set up last year by Suzanne Grant and Noreen Walton, it is first and foremost a mutual support group, which also gives a voice to those living with long Covid. A huge number of people who would otherwise be invisible and silent, by organising collectively, have become very visible, and justifiably very vocal.

Their symptoms include severe fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle inflammation, acute headaches, skin rashes and poor mental health. And in too many cases, there are people suffering from all of these.

Group members talk about how they are falling through the cracks of a system which is supposed to support us all from the cradle to the grave.

Economically there is a price. Research shows that the effects of long Covid mean £10.5 billion worth of paid and unpaid work is being lost across the UK. But it is the human toll that should concern us the most.

People have a fundamental human right to clinical treatment, but also to fair treatment by the state and by their employer.

They are entitled to dignity and respect.

One important new development is the establishment by NHS Forth Valley of a permanent long Covid team, which should be in place by September. It is to the credit of the local health board that this initiative will get recurring funding, so will be in place for the long term.

Its services must be designed from the bottom up by those exceptional people I met, not from the top down.

And it is they who will also be the best judge of the difference it is making but those outcomes are a matter for us all.