Most symptoms linked to a prolonged but mild form of COVID-19 tend to disappear during the year following the infection of patients with the virus, shows a scientific study published Thursday.
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“Most of the symptoms or conditions that develop after a mild Covid-19 infection persist for several months, but return to normal within a year,” say the authors of this study in Israel published in British Medical Newspaper (BMJ).
Long-lasting COVID is characterized by the persistence of symptoms or the appearance of new symptoms more than four weeks after an initial infection.
Interviewed by AFP, Maytal Bivas-Benita, researcher at the Israeli KI Research Institute and co-author of the study, said she was “encouraged” by the results, in a context in particular of fears as to the duration during which symptoms may persist.
“The vast majority of patients will be fine after a year, and I think that’s good news,” she said.
The results also show that “vaccinated people were less exposed to the risk of breathing difficulties – the most common effect observed in the event of mild illness – than unvaccinated people”, it is specified.
In detail, only minor differences were observed between male and female patients. In contrast, children developed lesser effects than adults during the early phase of Covid-19, effects which mostly disappeared by the end of the period with similar results for all the different variants of COVID-19. 19 tested.
“These results suggest that, although the phenomenon of long COVID has been feared and discussed since the start of the pandemic, the vast majority of cases with mild infection do not suffer from severe or chronic long-term symptoms,” say the authors. researchers.
This work was carried out on the basis of electronic records from Israel’s second health insurance fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services, of which nearly two million members were tested for COVID-19 between March 1, 2020 and on October 1, 2021.
By September, at least 17 million people in Europe had suffered from long-lasting COVID in the first two years of the pandemic, according to modeling from the World Health Organization.