What’s New About Long-Covid and Vaccination?

People recovering from breakthrough COVID-19 infection should continue to monitor their health if lingering symptoms make it difficult for daily activities.

Even vaccinated people with mild breakthrough COVID-19 infections can experience debilitating, lingering symptoms that affect the heart, brain, lungs, and other parts of the body, according to new research published in Nature Medicine.

How Important is Vaccination for COVID-19?

“Vaccinations remain critically important in the fight against COVID-19,” said first author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University.

Since the pandemic started more than 524 million people globally have been infected with the virus; of these, more than 6 million have died – including more than 1 million in the United States alone.

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‘The vaccination against the COVID-19 virus reduced the risk of death by 34% and the risk of getting long-COVID-19 by 15%, compared with unvaccinated patients infected with the virus.’

Vaccinations reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 but vaccines seem to only provide modest protection against long-COVID.

Researchers classified patients as fully vaccinated if they had received two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccine. At the time the research was conducted the database used for this study did not include information about whether patients received the booster dose.

Now that we understand that COVID-19 can have lingering health consequences even among the vaccinated, we need to move toward developing mitigation strategies that can be implemented for the long term since it does not appear that COVID-19 is going away any time soon.

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We need to urgently develop and deploy additional layers of protection that could be sustainably implemented to reduce the risk of long-COVID 19.

Such protective layers could include nasal vaccines that are more convenient or potent than the current shots, or other types of vaccines or drugs aimed at minimizing the risks of long-COVID.

COVID-19 Seems Unavoidable for Vaccinated People Too

For the study, researchers analyzed the de-identified medical records of more than 13 million veterans. The records are in a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s largest integrated healthcare delivery system.

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They examined data of 113,474 unvaccinated COVID-19 patients and 33,940 vaccinated patients who had experienced COVID-19 breakthrough infections, all from January 1 through October 31, 2021.

The patients with COVID-19 were mostly older, white men; however, the researchers also analyzed data that included more than 1.3 million women and adults of all ages and races.

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In addition to complications involving the heart, brain, and lungs, other symptoms associated with long-COVID included disorders involving the kidneys, blood clotting, mental health, metabolism, and the gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal systems.

Long-COVID risks were 17% higher among vaccinated immunocompromised people with breakthrough infections compared with previously healthy, vaccinated people who experienced breakthrough infections.

An analysis of 3,667 vaccinated patients who were hospitalized with breakthrough COVID-19 infections showed that they experienced 2.5 times the risk of death than people who were hospitalized with influenza.

They also had a 27% higher risk of long-COVID in the first 30 days after diagnosis compared with 14,337 people who were hospitalized with seasonal influenza.

The constellation of findings shows that the burden of death and disease experienced by people with breakthrough COVID-19 infections is not trivial.

Source-Medindia