NEW YORK (National Times) – Long Covid sufferers who had a mild bout of the virus should expect their symptoms to resolve within a year, researchers have suggested.<\/p>\n
People with ongoing effects after illness have been concerned that lingering symptoms will not disappear.<\/p>\n
But academics suggest that “mild disease does not lead to serious or chronic long-term morbidity”.<\/p>\n
The team of Israeli researchers compared data on people who had not been infected with Covid-19 with people who suffered a mild form of the virus, meaning they suffered symptoms but did not require hospital care.<\/p>\n
They also examined information on lingering symptoms after infection in both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.<\/p>\n
Almost two million people s information was looked at in the research, all of whom had taken a Covid-19 test between March 2020 and October 2021.<\/p>\n
Data on almost 300,000 people who had a confirmed mild case of Covid was compared with the same number of people who had not contracted the disease.<\/p>\n
The research team also examined information on a range of long Covid symptoms including loss of taste and smell, breathing problems, concentration and memory issues, also known as brain fog.<\/p>\n
They discovered that symptoms of long Covid “remained for several months” but almost always resolved within a year.<\/p>\n
“Lingering” breathing problems were also found to be more common among people who had not received a Covid vaccination compared with those who had.<\/p>\n
“Although the long Covid phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, we observed that most health outcomes arising after a mild disease course remained for several months and returned to normal within the first year,” the academics wrote in The BMJ.<\/p>\n
“This nationwide dataset of patients with mild Covid-19 suggests that mild disease does not lead to serious or chronic long-term morbidity and adds a small continuous burden on healthcare providers.<\/p>\n
“Importantly, the risk for lingering dyspnoea was reduced in vaccinated patients with breakthrough infection compared with unvaccinated people, while risks of all other outcomes were comparable.”<\/p>\n
The researchers said the largest number of long-term symptoms for at least six months was found among people aged 41 to 60 compared with other age groups.<\/p>\n
The different types of coronavirus strains were not found to have an effect on the duration of long Covid.<\/p>\n
An estimated 2.1 million people in the UK were experiencing self-reported long Covid at the start of December last year, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).<\/p>\n
Long Covid is defined as symptoms continuing for more than four weeks after infection. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK (National Times) – Long Covid sufferers who had a mild bout of the virus should expect their symptoms to resolve within a year, researchers have suggested. People with ongoing effects after illness have been concerned that lingering symptoms will not disappear. But academics suggest that “mild disease does not lead to serious or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","entry"],"yoast_head":"\n