Israel: A recent study claims that long COVID sufferers who had a mild bout of the virus should expect their symptoms to resolve within a year. After-illness patients have been worried that their persistent symptoms won’t go away.

However, according to academics, “mild disease does not lead to serious or chronic long-term morbidity.” The Israeli research team compared data on COVID-19-negative individuals with people who had the virus but had only minor symptoms and did not need hospital treatment.

They also examined data on post-infection symptoms in both vaccines- and non-vaccinated individuals. Almost two million people’s information was looked at in the research, all of whom had taken a COVID-19 test between March 2020 and October 2021.

Data on almost 300,000 people who had a mild confirmed case of COVID was compared with the same number of people who had not contracted the disease. The research team also examined information on a range of long COVID symptoms including loss of taste and smell, breathing problems, concentration and memory issues, also known as brain fog, as per the report.

They found that long COVID symptoms  “remained for several months” but nearly invariably disappeared within a year. Additionally, the study discovered that COVID vaccination pros were more likely than COVID immunisation patients to experience “lingering” breathing issues.

The researchers stated that, compared to other age groups, people aged 41 to 60 had the highest number of long-term symptoms lasting at least six months. The duration of lengthy COVID was not observed to be impacted by the various coronavirus strain types.

According to the Office for National (ONS) Statistics figures, 2.1 million persons in the UK were thought to be having self-reported lengthy COVID at the beginning of December last year. When symptoms persist for more than four weeks following an infection, it is referred to as long COVID.

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