Corona is not over yet. For example, Germany is already preparing for autumn. The new measures are discussed. Including the need for masks and further vaccinations.
Every eighth corona-infected person has at least one long covid symptom weeks or months after infection. This is the result of a large-scale study from the Netherlands, which was published on Thursday in the renowned journal “The Lancet”.
Researchers asked more than 76,400 adults to fill out an online questionnaire on 23 common long-term Covid symptoms. Between March 2020 and August 2021, each participant completed the questionnaire 24 times.
Chest pain, Difficulty in breathing, Muscle pain
During the study period, more than 4,200 or 5.5 percent of the participants said they had been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Of those infected, more than 21 percent had at least one new or severely worsening symptom three to five months after infection. However, about nine percent of uninfected participants also reported a similar increase.
According to researchers, statistics show that 12.7 percent of corona patients, ie about one in eight patients, suffer from complaints for a long time.
A striking feature of the study is the large, uninfected control group, with whose data the researchers were able to differentiate between the true late effects of the coronavirus and the general effects of the pandemic.
Pre- and post-infection symptoms were also recorded in infected people, which helped researchers identify exactly which symptoms are related to the coronavirus. Common long-term Covid symptoms are chest pain, difficulty in breathing, muscle pain, loss of taste and smell, and general fatigue.
New corona variant not tested
“By looking at symptoms before and after Sars-CoV-2 infection in an uninfected control group and people, we were also able to account for symptoms that may have been caused by other health aspects of the pandemic, such as lack of stress and uncertainty. Huh. said author Aranka Ballering of the University of Groningen.
However, the authors point out that the study does not include new corona variants such as Delta or Omicron. Therefore, it also does not provide any data on symptoms such as brain fog, which is considered only a common sign of long COVID since the new variant has been introduced.
People who have been vaccinated show lower long-term Covid rates
So future studies should examine aspects of psychological symptoms such as depression and anxiety, as well as brain fog, insomnia, and exhaustion even after minimal physical exertion, recommended study author Judith Rosemelon.
Experts Christopher Brightling and Rachel Evans from the University of Leicester, UK, who were not involved in the study, praised the study as a “major progress” compared to previous studies on the long-term. It is encouraging that “new data from other studies indicate that there is a lower long-term Covid rate in people who have been vaccinated or infected with the Omicron variant,” they wrote in The Lancet. (SDA/JMH)
