Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy to require NHS Test and Trace to contact individuals who test positive for covid-19 on a periodic basis to assess whether they are suffering from long covid symptoms.

National Health Service Test and Trace brings together testing, contact tracing and outbreak management into an end-to-end service to help prevent the spread of the virus, protect local communities and save lives. The more rapidly we can identify people who may have been at risk of infection and, if necessary, tell them to self-isolate, the more effectively we can reduce the spread of the virus and maintain transmission at low levels.

Long term COVID-19 refers to symptoms beyond this period of infectivity and the Government, as well as our expert scientific groups, continues to monitor and assess data from a wide variety of sources to better understand the disease course of COVID-19.