Long Covid epidemiology (prevalence, incidence, recovery rates)

I don't yet know how much is reliable reporting so I wont link to just news articles but await some science, but there is a new Covid strain that appears in early data to be much, MUCH more infectious than delta and has so many mutations it may evade the vaccine. Its all over my news feeds. Its primarily found in the south of Africa. However we currently have no information on how lethal it is, just how infectious. It spreads like its the hare and delta is the turtle. Given we have known about it for only a month or so we have no data on lethality that I have seen yet. We can hope its much less lethal. Deaths lag infection by weeks in earlier strains, so we might have to wait even a month to see how dangerous it really is.

This is what happens when billions of people are still not vaccinated. Even with vaccinations mutations might arise, but with countries with very low vaccination this is much more likely.

UK is already stopping air travel to that part of the world. Our health minister just announced we are watching but nothing is certain yet.

 

Mail Online:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...ts-living-long-Covid-official-data-shows.html

 

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From the front page of the Sunday Times (Irish edition):


I'm not sure whether these numbers hold up, given the numbers vaccinated.

 

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An article about the study mentioned previously here:

 

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Twitter thread from prof. Kunst with updated estimates of Long Covid cases and new ME/CFS cases

 

Abstract

Long COVID remains a broadly defined syndrome, with estimates of prevalence and duration varying widely. We use data from rounds 3–5 of the REACT-2 study (n = 508,707; September 2020 – February 2021), a representative community survey of adults in England, and replication data from round 6 (n = 97,717; May 2021) to estimate the prevalence and identify predictors of persistent symptoms lasting 12 weeks or more; and unsupervised learning to cluster individuals by reported symptoms. At 12 weeks in rounds 3–5, 37.7% experienced at least one symptom, falling to 21.6% in round 6. Female sex, increasing age, obesity, smoking, vaping, hospitalisation with COVID-19, deprivation, and being a healthcare worker are associated with higher probability of persistent symptoms in rounds 3–5, and Asian ethnicity with lower probability. Clustering analysis identifies a subset of participants with predominantly respiratory symptoms. Managing the long-term sequelae of COVID-19 will remain a major challenge for affected individuals and their families and for health services.

Open access, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29521-z

 

2 posts moved from the long covid in the media and social media thread.

Not that the NIH is an arbiter of this, but they are likely using a conservative estimate so this gives a pretty hard floor.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1516974419968679936

 

What the actual prevalence of Long Covid might be is kind of the million dollar question that no one really has a good answer to. Of course, it depends a lot on how you define Long Covid. At one extreme, we have the studies that say anyone who reports any of a long list of symptoms has LC (some of these find LC prevalence of 50% or so, which doesn't seem credible). Then you have studies that report any one symptom minus controls reporting the same symptoms (these ones are all over the place, depending on their criteria for who did or didn't have Covid, and they will significantly underestimate for common symptoms). Then you have the ONS survey asking people directly if they have Long Covid (which is 7% for people with two mRNA doses, 15% for non-vaccinated from earlier waves, less now). Finally, you have some chart review studies that find very low prevalence (less than 1% in some cases).

Worth noting that although the ONS numbers are going up quickly recently because there are so many Omicron infections, the percentage of people reporting LC 4-12 weeks post infection is significantly lower for Omicron (my guess is this is due to boosters, but it could also be intrinsic to Omicron or due to previous infections). From the ONS data, 10% is too high and even 5% for boosted people is too high. I don't think the data supports the claim that 10% of people getting infected today will end up with LC.

I guess which numbers you believe depends how much you trust people to know they have LC (or that they "are still experiencing symptoms more than 4 weeks after you first had COVID-19, that are not explained by something else"). Are there a lot of people out there who have long term symptoms and don't realize they are connected to Covid? Maybe, but I'd be surprised if it was a huge number at this point. I'm inclined to think the ONS survey is probably the best estimate that we have (2.7% of the total UK population 6 weeks ago, maybe a little higher in the US because of less vaccination and more infections).

 

merged thread
One Grim Statistic Lays Bare The Truly Relentless Grip of Long COVID

https://www.sciencealert.com/one-grim-statistic-lays-bare-the-truly-relentless-grip-of-long-covid

This article is about the study being discussed on this thread:

https://www.s4me.info/threads/clini...ecovery-2022-phosp-covid-collaborative.27233/

 

Only covers hospitalised - potentially misses a huge number