Preprint Post-viral symptoms and conditions are more frequent in COVID-19 than influenza, but not more persistent, 2024, Tesch

[CFS is referred but I don't think they say how they define it]

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3870058/v1

Post-viral symptoms and conditions are more frequent in COVID-19 than influenza, but not more persistent

Falko Tesch1

Email

Franz Ehm1

Friedrich Loser2

Annika Vivirito3

Danny Wende4

Manuel Batram5

Lars Bechmann6

Tilo Buschmann7

Simone Menzer6

Marion Ludwig8

Martin Roessler4

Martin Seifert1

Giselle Sarganas Margolis9

Lukas Reitzle9

Christina König2

Claudia Schulte4

Dagmar Hertle4

Pedro Ballesteros4

Stefan Baßler7

Barbara Bertele2

Thomas Bitterer6

Cordula Riederer10

Franziska Sobik10

Christa Scheidt-Nave11

Jochen Schmitt1

1 University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus at TU Dresden,

2 Techniker Krankenkasse,

3 InGef - Institute for Applied Health Research Berlin GmbH,

4 BARMER Institut für Gesundheitssystemforschung (bifg),

5 Vandage GmbH,

6 IKK classic,

7 AOK PLUS,

8 InGef - Institute for Applied Health Research Berlin,

9 Robert Koch Institute,

10 DAK-Gesundheit,

11 Robert Koch Institut

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3870058/v1

This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License

Post-viral symptoms have long been known in the medical community but have received more public attention during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many post-viral symptoms were reported as particularly frequent after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

However, there is still a lack of evidence regarding the specificity, frequency and persistence of these symptoms in comparison to other viral infectious diseases such as Influenza.

We addressed this topic by investigating a large population-based cohort based on German routine healthcare data.

We matched 573,791 individuals with a PCR-test confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection from the year 2020 to contemporary controls without SARS-CoV-2 infection and controls from the last Influenza outbreak in 2018 and followed them up to 18 months.

We found that post-viral symptoms as defined for COVID-19 by the WHO as well as tissue damage were more frequent among the COVID-19 cohort than the Influenza cohort.

Persistence of post-viral symptoms was however similar between COVID-19 and Influenza.

We conclude that post-viral symptoms following SARS-CoV-2 infection constitute a substantial disease burden as they are frequent and often persist for many months.

As COVID-19 is becoming endemic, the disease must not be trivialized.

Research should focus on the development of effective treatments for post-viral symptoms.