Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what research his Department is undertaking on the longer-term health impacts of covid-19 for women.

The Department, through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and UK Research and Innovation, have launched a £20 million joint research call to fund ambitious and comprehensive research to understand and address the longer term physical and mental health effects of COVID-19 in individuals who contracted the virus but were not hospitalised. The aim is to support two or three large consortia and a number of extensions to existing studies. These studies will be robust and of sufficient scale with the potential to include analysis of factors such as gender.

There are also several other large Departmental and NIHR-supported surveillance studies which are looking to understand the importance of factors such as age and potentially gender in determining COVID-19 disease severity, for example Virus Watch and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children.