New UK research is one of the first to examine the potential risk of persistent symptoms after a case of covid-19 in vaccinated people, a phenomenon often known as long covid. The study suggests that vaccinated people who become infected are half as likely to have long-term symptoms as unvaccinated people. It is important to note that this risk reduction is in addition to protection against any symptoms of covid-19 that vaccination already provides.
The data of this new research, published Wednesday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, comes from the COVID symptom study: a long-running project that has attempted to track the spread of the pandemic with a free mobile app, which encourages people in the UK to report any covid symptoms they experience and other relevant details, including whether they have tested positive for the virus as well as its vaccination status. The app was launched in March 2020 and there are reportedly about 4.5 million unique users. In the UK, people have access to vaccines developed by Pfizer / BioNTech, Oxford / AstraZeneca and Moderna.
The researchers compared the results of nearly one million users who reported being partially and / or completely vaccinated with a control group of unvaccinated users. As of July 2021, approximately 8,000 of these vaccinated individuals reported a confirmed advanced infection (less than 1% of the total sample), with only about 2,000 reporting an infection a week or more after the second dose. Compared with unvaccinated and infected people, vaccinated people were significantly less likely to report needing hospitalization, reported no more frequent symptoms, and reported fewer symptoms on average when they became ill. Only about 5.2% of those fully vaccinated and infected reported showing symptoms beyond 28 days, compared with 11.4% in the control group, indicating that the chances of having these symptoms in the long term they were reduced by 47%.
“Vaccinations massively reduce the chances of people having long covets in two ways. First, by reducing the risk of symptoms by 8 to 10 times and by half reducing by half the chances that any infection will become long-lived, if it occurs, ”said study author Tim Spector, a researcher at King’s College London and principal investigator of the project, said in a statement released by the university. “Whatever the duration of symptoms, we see that infections after two vaccinations are also much milder, so vaccines are changing the disease for the better.”
The study is one of the first to try to measure the possible prevalence of long covids in advanced infections. Therefore, this may not be the last word on how it can happen often. In July, for example, a study on health workers in Israel Found that 19% of people with advanced infections had persistent symptoms for more than six weeks. Similarly, however, the chances of having an infection in the first place were low (around 2% in the group of 1,500 people who were tested regularly).
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Studies on long covids have generally found different prevalence rates in survivors, ranging from 10% to 30%. These estimates are further complicated by the fact that some people may experience many of the symptoms closely related to long covidi, such as mental and physical fatigue, after having others. respiratory infections, while many people may have them symptoms for no clear reason.
While the exact figures may change, it seems fair to say that vaccines offer significant but incomplete protection against the worrying possibility of a long covidi.