'Paediatricians, GPs, and schools don’t understand childhood long covid'

Parents can find it difficult to get the right medical support, as it is not widely known that young people can develop the condition

Christina Doyle and her son Conor, 18, who has Long Covid. Picture: Moya Nolan.

Jack Lambert, consultant in infectious diseases at the Mater, Rotunda, and University College Dublin, recalls seeing “long covid coming” in March 2020.

Researching the SARS and MERS viruses, he found that some people — infected a decade or two earlier —were still sick years later. “I set up a long-covid clinic in summer 2020. I started seeing adults then, and adolescents were arriving by early 2021. I started seeing some children — under-12s — in 2022, 2023.”