Most of the symptoms associated with a prolonged but mild form of Covid-19 tend to disappear within a year of infection, according to a scientific study.
“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”, highlight the authors of the Israeli study published in the British Medical Newspaper ( BMJ).
‘Long Covid’ is characterized by the persistence of symptoms after infection, or by the appearance of new symptoms more than four weeks after an initial infection.
Maytal Bivas-Benita, a researcher at the KI Israelite Research Institute and co-author of the study, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that she is “encouraged” by the results, in a context where there are fears about the duration of symptoms.
“The vast majority of patients will be fine after a year, and I think that’s good news,” he said.
The results of the investigation also show that “vaccinated people were less exposed to the risk of respiratory difficulties – the most frequent effect observed in case of mild disease – than unvaccinated people,” he also stressed.
Only small differences were observed in the study between male and female patients.
In contrast, children developed fewer effects than adults during the early phase of COVID-19, with symptoms mostly disappearing by the end of the period, with similar results for all the different COVID-19 variants tested.
“These results suggest that, although the phenomenon of persistent Covid-19 has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of cases of mild infection do not suffer from severe or chronic long-term symptoms,” they point out. the researchers.
The study was conducted on the basis of electronic records from Israel’s second largest health insurance fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services, of which nearly two million members underwent covid-19 tests between March 1, 2020. and on October 1, 2021.
As of September, at least 17 million people in Europe had suffered from persistent Covid-19 in the first two years of the pandemic, according to data from the World Health Organization.
Source: TSF
