People Are Far Less Likely to Get Long COVID After Omicron, Study Finds

Researchers still have a lot to learn about Long COVID—when symptoms linger long after a COVID-19 infection is over—but new data suggest there may be some good news for people infected with the virus more recently. In a study that will be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in April (and which has not yet been published), researchers report that people who tested positive for COVID-19 during Omicron waves were no more likely to report lingering symptoms after recovery than people who had never had COVID-19. By contrast, those who were infected with the original SARS-CoV-2 variant were up to 67% more likely to report lingering symptoms than those who did not have COVID-19. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Dr. Carol Strahm and Dr. Philipp Kohler, both from the division of infectious diseases and hospital epidemiology at Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen in Switzerland, led the study of 1,200 health care workers in the country. The participants, mostly female nurses, agreed to regular PCR testing for COVID-19 during periods when the original virus was circulating, from February 2020 to January 2021, and during the Omicron wave from January to June 2022. In March and September 2021 and in June 2022, all of the participants answered an online questionnaire about any lasting symptoms they might be experiencing, which could include fatigue, loss of smell or taste, and shortness of breath. The aggregate of these sympt...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news