Covid cases are rising again, but your chances of long-term complications are lower
Summary
The threat of lingering health problems has subsided, though it hasn’t disappeared.
A summer Covid wave is hitting the country, but there’s one consolation: Your chances of developing long Covid have fallen since the start of the pandemic.
That’s the finding from a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that about 10% of people infected with the virus’s original strain developed long Covid. By contrast, the risk of developing long Covid dropped to 3.5% with the virus’s Omicron variant among vaccinated people. For the unvaccinated, the risk was 7.7.%.
Researchers defined long Covid as people who experienced persistent and debilitating symptoms such as a racing heartbeat or brain fog, or other new health problems linked to the initial illness, a month or more after their infection.
About 70% of the drop in long Covid cases was due to vaccination and 30% because of changes in the virus itself, the study determined.
Four years since the start of the pandemic, we’re getting used to periodic waves of Covid cases, including the uptick we’re seeing now, driven by Omicron subvariants. The threats of severe illness and lingering health problems have significantly subsided, though they haven’t disappeared.
Conducted using records from the Veterans Affairs health system, researchers compared more than 440,000 people with a Covid infection between March 2020 and January 2022, with more than 4.7 million controls.
“It is good news that the risk has declined over time but even the remaining risk is still significant," says Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis who was the lead author on the study.
For a widespread virus that touches almost everyone across the globe, even a smaller risk translates into millions of people with lingering health problems after a Covid infection, he notes. “That is a lot when we’re dealing with a disease that we still don’t know how to cure," he says.
Another Covid summer
Levels of Covid in wastewater samples are high now nationally, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveillance system. Wastewater testing detects traces of disease and is considered an early indicator of rising infections within a community.
Covid-19 test positivity rates were 11% in the week ending July 6, according to the CDC data tracker. Emergency department visits are also ticking up, although rates of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid remain low.
While vaccination reduces severity of illness—lowering your chances of death or hospitalization—the symptoms of mild to moderate infections remain largely the same with newer subvariants, doctors say. And while some people report milder illness with reinfections, others may get more sick.
Why vaccination helps
There are several reasons why vaccines may reduce your likelihood of developing long Covid. The shots reduce the threat of severe disease, which is associated with a greater likelihood of longer-term health complications, says Al-Aly. Vaccines also lower the viral load and help the immune system clear the virus faster.
“There’s less virus to go around, to cause havoc, to persist in the tissues—all of this could help explain why vaccinated people have less risk of long Covid," he says.
It’s still unclear whether you can further lower your risk of long Covid with Covid booster shots, says Al-Aly. The study only compared people with the initial round of vaccinations to those who didn’t get any shots.
The VA research has some shortcomings. Its data sets are big and comprehensive, but consist predominantly of older, white men. Long Covid, on the other hand, tends to affect women more than men, notes Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor and chair of the department of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and director of its long Covid clinic.
Still, she says, the study’s findings that vaccination helps stave off long-term health problems aligns with what she sees with long Covid patients.
“There were some questions before around ‘Are vaccines really protective against long Covid,’" she says. “This gives us more data that yes, they are. But they aren’t fully protective, so people still can’t let their guard down."
Though fewer patients come in with long Covid with the newer variants, demand for treatment is still high, she notes. “We still have next-available appointments in October or November," she says.
Write to Sumathi Reddy at Sumathi.Reddy@wsj.com
