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

One in 50 Britons now have long Covid: 1.33million people said they had condition at start of January — with 'Omicron effect' still to come
  • ONS report estimated a record number had the condition up to January 2
  • Number was up 5% on the 1.26million reporting symptoms on December 6
  • Defined as symptoms four weeks after infection so is unaffected by Omicron
A record one in 50 Brits were living with long Covid at the start of January, official data showed today.

An Office for National Statistics (ONS) report estimated 1.33million adults were suffering symptoms of the wide-ranging condition as of January 2.

The figure was up 5 per cent on the 1.26million thought to have long Covid — defined by the ONS as having symptoms for over four weeks — on December 6.

Fatigue was the most common, affecting half of people.

The new estimate will not have been affected by the Omicron surge in December because of the time it takes to develop the condition.

There are fears the new wave could exacerbate the problem, after record numbers of people caught the disease. However, it is not yet known how the mild variant's decreased severity could impact long Covid.

Statisticians also estimated 554,000 were still suffering a year after catching the virus — the highest figure on record.

The estimates are based on a survey of 306,000 people who self-reported suffering with long Covid, meaning they were not necessarily diagnosed.

Experts have previously cast doubt over the ONS's long Covid sufferer findings, with some saying they are likely to be an overestimation given symptoms like headaches and fatigue can be linked to a variety of conditions.

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Moved post
An article about the study mentioned previously here:

A cause of America's labor shortage: Millions with long COVID

Millions of Americans are struggling with long-term symptoms after contracting COVID-19, with many of them unable to work due to chronic health issues. Katie Bach, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said she was "floored" when she started crunching the numbers on the ranks of workers who have stepped out of the job market due to long COVID.

Her analysis found that an equivalent of 1.6 million people are missing from the full-time workforce because of the disease, which can leave people incapacitated for months with persistent symptoms including fatigue, brain fog, headaches, memory loss and heart palpitations.

"It was so much bigger than I thought it would be," Bach told CBS MoneyWatch. "Then it was like, `Why is no one talking about this?'"

To put Bach's figure into perspective, the country's labor force remains 2.2 million people short of its pre-pandemic size — an issue that's causing headaches for many employers. Earlier in the crisis, some business owners blamed extra unemployment aid for keeping workers on the sidelines. But those benefits ended in September, and the labor force still hasn't fully rebounded.
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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.

 
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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
Not even one in four people have completely recovered from COVID a full year after being hospitalized with the disease, a UK study indicated Sunday, warning that long COVID could become a common condition.

The study involving more than 2,300 people also found that women were 33 percent less likely to fully recover than men.

It also found that obese people were half as likely to fully recover, while those who needed mechanical ventilation were 58 percent less likely.

The study looked at the health of people who were discharged from 39 British hospitals with COVID between March 2020 and April 2021, then assessed the recovery of 807 of them five months and one year later.

Just 26 percent reported a full recovery after five months, and that number rose only slightly to 28.9 percent after a year, according to the study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal.
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This article is about the study being discussed on this thread:

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