Tens of thousands in poor health long after being infected with COVID-19

A new study suggests tens of thousands of people in England may have lasting COVID-19 symptoms more than a year after infection. The study collected information from more than 3 million people with around 2.4 million of them giving their consent to follow-up from the researchers.

A study suggests tens of thousands of people in England may have lasting COVID-19 symptoms more than a year after infection. Source: AAP / Matt Dunham/AP

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TRANSCRIPT

It's one of the largest COVID-19 studies in the world.

Led by researchers at Imperial College London, it suggests tens of thousands of people in England still have symptoms more than a year after infection.

It's found 7.5 per cent reported persistent symptoms lasting 12 weeks or more, and 5% reported symptoms lasting more than a year.

Chair in Epidemiology at Imperial College London, Professor Paul Elliott.

"So the REACT programme is really one of the largest studies in the world that was looking at the distribution of the virus throughout the population and clearly has huge amounts of data on people who took part. And we're taking advantage of that by looking at who got symptoms that lasted more than 12 weeks after their initial infection, which is so-called long COVID."

Professor of Public Health at Imperial College London Helen Ward says loss of smell and taste and severe fatigue were common.

"The symptoms that those people had that were most pronounced in relation to everybody else were things like loss of smell and taste or changes to those senses, but also breathlessness, more severe fatigue and this difficulty thinking and concentrating, poor memory, those kind of symptoms."

She says people with persistent symptoms also reported trouble sleeping and were more likely to report having anxiety and depression.

Professor Ward says some of those studied had as many as eight different symptoms going on.

And the researchers found people who got infected during the early stages of the pandemic were the most likely to report Long COVID.

"People who got their infection, their first infection early in the pandemic, so what we call the wildtype variant of the virus, were far more likely to report ongoing and persistent symptoms than people who got it later. And what that means, we don't fully understand that, it could be that those exposed later already had some immunity or they'd been vaccinated and so on. But it means that the biggest burden of ongoing health problem seems to be in those people who were infected early on."