The risk of developing long Covid if infected with the virus is only a tenth of the risk at the start of the pandemic, according to scientists tracking the virus.
The REACT study from Imperial College London found that a combination of immunity developed from previous infections and vaccinations, as well as the fact that the virus is now less severe than at the start of the pandemic, contributed to the reduced risk.
About 2.8 percent of people infected with the Covid Omicron variant developed long-term Covid-19 illness, defined as symptoms lasting 12 weeks or longer.
Omicron has been dominant in various mutations or subvariants in the UK since January 2022. They have different names – for example, Pyrola or BA.2.86, Arcturus (XBB.1.16) and Kraken (XBB.1.5) – all derived from a variant of Omicron.
This represents just over a fifth of the original “wild type” Covid strain, 13.8 percent for the Alpha variant and 9.3 percent for Delta, according to Imperial scientists who have tracked Covid since its pandemic. Pandemic.
“We found that compared to the wild-type virus, those who became infected when Omicron was dominant were much less likely to report symptoms that lasted longer than 12 weeks,” said Christina Atchison from Imperial College London.
“This may be due to changes in the level of immunity in the population due to previous exposure to the virus and vaccination,” she added.
Professor Helen Ward, also from Imperial College London, added: “We show that people with Covid at a time when Omicron was dominant were 88 per cent less likely to have persistent symptoms for 12 weeks or more than people at that time.” when the disease was wild type. “”
Asked whether the decline in Covid-19 severity played a role in the duration of symptoms, she said: “We can’t say based on our data, but we do know that the severity of the initial symptoms of Covid-19.” “Symptoms are closely related to the duration of symptoms, and people report less severe symptoms with newer variants, which may be due to a combination of previous infections, vaccinations, and possibly less severity of the variant itself.”
The research, part of a series of government-funded REACT projects, shows that Covid remains a serious problem affecting tens of thousands of people.
But the proportion of people now affected by new Covid cases has fallen significantly.
The new study’s findings are based on a representative sample of more than 250,000 people in England surveyed as part of the ongoing REACT study.
The most common persistent symptoms were found to be mild fatigue, trouble thinking or concentrating, and joint pain.
But other persistent symptoms reported included loss or change in sense of smell or taste, shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, chest tightness or pain, and poor memory.
People are more likely to report symptoms for a longer period of time after initial infection if they are women, have severe initial symptoms, were infected early in the pandemic, or have pre-existing health problems.
The study also found that the proportion of people recovered after 4 to 12 weeks dropped from 12.7 percent at the start of the pandemic to 3.4 percent for the Omicron variant.
The proportion of those who have recovered after four weeks has now fallen from 66.9 percent to 93.7 percent, meaning just over 6 percent now experience symptoms that last longer than a month.
In the latest analysis, the team collected responses to a follow-up survey from 276,840 adults in England who registered for the REACT study. Of these, 59 percent said they tested positive for Covid between 2020 and the end of 2022.
Die Analyse zeigt, dass die durchschnittliche Dauer einer symptomatischen Erkrankung etwa 10 Tage betrug, aber 1 von 10 Personen in der Studie berichteten über Symptome, die länger als 4 Wochen anhielten, 1 von 13 über mehr als 12 Wochen und 1 von 20 Uber mehr als one year. The analysis found that almost a third of people who reported symptoms after 12 weeks recovered within a year.
Although the number of new long Covid cases appears to be falling, there are still a large number of people who still have long Covid-19 status, many of whom have been suffering from symptoms for more than a year, they told Scientists.
The number of people in the UK with long-term Covid-19 is estimated to be between 1 million and 2 million.
The results will be published in the journal Natural communication.
Source: I News
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