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People infected with COVID-19 after getting doubly vaccinated are associated with a 41 percent lower chance of developing long COVID symptoms, according to new study published in Britain.
People infected before being vaccinated were more likely to have symptoms at least 12 weeks later, highlighting “the need for public health initiatives” to increase vaccinations, say authors of the study published by Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
“We investigated long COVID incidence by vaccination status in a random sample of U.K. adults from April 2020 to November 2021,” the study says.
Long-term symptoms affect about 2% of the U.K. population, with two-thirds of those people suffering functional impairment. The study’s authors said that it’s clear vaccines lower infections and transmissions and, therefore, long COVID.
“We investigated whether infection following two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine is associated with a reduction in Long COVID symptoms after 12 weeks, relative to being unvaccinated when infected, using prospective data from a large, random sample of the UK population with routine testing,” they wrote.
Survey participants were asked if they described themselves as having long COVID or “still experiencing symptoms more than 4 weeks after you first had COVID-19 that are not explained by something else.”
Some “outcome misclassification was possible,” the authors wrote. Some participants could have had symptoms because of something unrelated to COVID, for example.
Researchers were “not able to investigate” people who had received just one vaccination, because most who got vaccinated once got a second shot during the 12-week follow-up.
The study included a large sample of participants randomly selected from the population. They were routinely tested, so the study included people who were asymptomatic and symptomatic, as well as self-reported tests.
Sources:
Oxford University Press: “Risk of Long Covid in people infected with SARS-CoV-2 after two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine: community-based, matched cohort study”
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