A worked example showing how each of the 12 PIP activities can be described for someone with long COVID. Every answer is written in the first person, in the plain wording assessors look for, and each one weaves in the reliability factors that decide how an activity scores.
What makes long COVID awkward to put on a form is that it hits your body and your brain in the same breath. On the physical side there is the breathlessness that arrives after a flight of stairs or two minutes on your feet, the heart that pounds and races the moment you stand up, and the greying vision and lightheadedness that go with it. Alongside that runs the cognitive side: brain fog, a memory that will not hold anything complicated, and the word-finding problem where you stop mid-sentence because the word you want has simply gone. Neither half is visible to look at, and describing only one of them leaves an assessor with half the picture.
That combination is what marks long COVID out from fatigue on its own. It is not just that tasks are tiring. It is that being upright sets off your breathing and your heart, so you have to sit to do things other people do standing, and that a conversation or a letter can defeat you even sitting down. Then there is the payback. You can have a genuinely good hour, get several things done, and spend the next two or three days paying for it with worse breathlessness, worse fog and feeling ill. Many people call this a crash, and it is the single thing most often left off a form, because the form asks what you can do and the crash is what happens afterwards.
This is exactly why the reliability rules matter. An activity only counts as something you can do if you can do it safely, to an acceptable standard, repeatedly and in a reasonable time. If you can only shower by sitting down, if a wash takes you half an hour with rests in the middle, if you can manage something once but not again for three days, or if you cannot take in what you were told at an appointment, then you cannot reliably do it, and that is what your answers need to show. Describe your worst and most common days rather than your best hour. The DWP always makes the final decision, but setting out the breathlessness, the fog and the days of payback accurately gives your form the strongest chance of being understood.
What to cover for each one. Your paid form writes the full answers for you.
Describe what standing at a hob and worktop does to your breathing and heart rate, and how soon you have to sit down or give up. Mention the perching stool, pre-chopped ingredients or microwave you now rely on, and any real safety risk from feeling faint or foggy near a hot pan. Explain that cooking one meal can cost you the rest of the day, so you cannot do it repeatedly or in a reasonable time.
This one is only about getting food from the plate to your mouth, chewing and swallowing it, so the cooking side belongs at question three. What can count is needing someone to remind or encourage you to eat on the days when fog means you simply do not notice you have missed meals, or being so breathless that you have to put your knife and fork down part way through. Altered taste or smell on its own does not usually reach it. If a meal in front of you is genuinely fine, leave this one alone.
Explain how brain fog makes you lose track of doses, inhalers or checking your heart rate, and mention the dosette box, phone alarms or family reminders you depend on. Describe what actually happens without those prompts, such as missed doses or taking the same one twice. Cover any breathing exercises, pacing plan or rehab you have been asked to keep up, and roughly how much of your week that takes.
This covers getting on and off the toilet, cleaning yourself afterwards and coping with any bladder or bowel accidents. What can count with long COVID is feeling faint or breathless as you stand up from the seat, so you need a rail or a hand to steady you, or leaving it too late because getting there takes so long on a bad day. If your bladder has been less reliable since you were ill, say how often that happens and what you use to manage it. If none of that applies to you, leave this one alone.
Describe how bending to reach socks and shoes leaves you breathless and lightheaded, and how lifting your arms to pull on a top sets your heart racing. Mention that you sit on the bed to dress, choose clothes without fastenings, or need someone to help on bad days. Explain how long it takes, and that in the days after you have overdone things you stay in what you slept in.
Explain that brain fog means you read the same paragraph several times and still cannot say what it said, so official letters and anything detailed do not stay in your head. Mention who reads important post with you or explains it afterwards, and describe how much worse this gets later in the day. Keep it about taking in and holding on to information rather than your eyesight.
Describe how quickly talking to people exhausts you, and how losing your words in front of others leaves you embarrassed and avoiding company. Mention any encouragement or company you need to face a social situation at all, and how often you cancel because you are crashing or dreading the payback. Keep this to how you cope with people, not the physical effort of getting there.
Explain how brain fog affects everyday sums, bills and keeping track of what has gone out, and give real examples such as a missed payment or paying the same thing twice. Mention who checks your account with you or takes on the bigger financial decisions. Make clear whether you could manage complicated money matters reliably on your own on a normal day, not just your best one.
Describe how a journey has to be planned around where you can sit down and how you would get home if you crashed, and how fog makes you miss stops or lose your way on routes you used to know well. Mention anyone who has to come with you and exactly why. Explain any fear of fainting or of being stranded that stops you going out on your own.
Say how far you can actually get on a typical day before breathlessness or a pounding heart forces you to stop, and how long you need before you could move again. Mention any stick, rollator or wheelchair you use, remembering that a wheelchair does not count as an aid for this question, so describe how you manage standing and walking without it. The heart of this one is repetition: doing it once, slowly, is not the same as being able to do it again and again.
The tips above are general pointers. Your paid form gives you a full, ready-to-copy answer for all 12 activities, written from your exact conditions, medication, aids and bad days, not a general example. This is a worked example for long COVID; yours is written for you. £99.99 one-off.
This is a worked example, not a script. It shows one honest way a person with long COVID might describe their worst and most common days, so you can see the level of detail and the plain wording that assessors are trained to look for. Please do not copy it word for word. Your own answers should reflect your long COVID, your own breathlessness and fog, the aids you actually use and the help you actually need or go without, because that is what the assessment is about and that is what makes an answer ring true.
Three things make a long COVID answer strong. Put both halves of the condition on the page, the breathing and heart symptoms and the cognitive ones, because leaving either out understates what you live with. Say what happens after the activity, so the crash and the days of payback are written down and not just implied. And keep coming back to whether you could do the task repeatedly and in a reasonable time, since a good hour is not the same as being able to do something reliably.
Some of the activities will not apply to you at all, and that is fine. Being honest about what long COVID does not change makes the difficulties you do describe more believable, so there is no need to stretch every question. If you would rather start from your own words, tell us about your health and we will write your answers from your own conditions, in the same first-person style, ready for you to read, edit and copy onto your PIP2 claim form or AR1 review form.
Tell us about your long COVID in your own words and we will write one full activity for you, free, before you pay anything.
Fill my form - free preview →