Long COVID: One of 3 recovered patients in Israel fail to regain pre-infection health months later
Long Covid
The effect of Covid-19 on adults is not fading easily and one in every three patients in Israel was found to have failed to return to pre-infection health levels even months later, revealed a new study. A peer-reviewed study by researchers from Maccabi Healthcare Services, the country’s health fund, based on surveys by 699 patients conducted found that “on an average after about five months of recovery about 34.6 per cent of participants reported not returning to their baseline health condition”.
Maccabi’s head of research and innovation Dr. Tal Palaton, who led the study, said symptoms including memory disturbances and muscle pain still prevailed in most patients, and warned of the public health consequences of long COVID, said a report in The Times of Israel.
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Policymakers “should expect a significant impact of this syndrome on public health,” it said.
The researchers said that these symptoms were found far more common among those who had symptoms that they had coronavirus, compared to those who had been asymptomatic. Besides, they were also more prevalent among women, overweight people and smokers.
The survey was conducted by Maccabi in September 2021, two months before the Omicron strain was detected in Israel which suggests that the results do not reflect any differences in long COVID patterns following recovery from Omicron compared to previous strains.
While the sample size of the study is large, it only represents 7.5% of those asked to take part in the survey. The authors hence acknowledge the possibility of some “selection bias,” meaning that as the survey was voluntary, people who experienced symptoms may have been more motivated to answer than others.
Nonetheless, the study contributes to a growing body of literature underscoring the phenomenon of long COVID, its incidence, and impact on wellbeing.
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Epidemiologist Ronit Calderon-Margalit of the Hebrew University, who wasn’t involved in the study, said it is a valuable contribution on an important topic. “I think that clinicians and healthcare personnel meet long COVID very frequently. However, the syndrome is not yet well characterized, in terms of incidence, prevalence, symptoms and prognosis,” she told The Times of Israel.
“The syndrome probably adds burden to community healthcare, and there is lack of information on how to treat it or what follow-up to have, or what could be the long-term consequences of the syndrome. We need high-quality studies to shed light on this topic,” she added.
As the new study had a control group of some 1,398 people, it shows how certain health complaints are much more common among those who recovered from COVID than in others.
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Some 37% of Covid patients who recovered reported memory disturbances compared to 14% of those who weren’t infected. Similarly, for chest pain, the comparative figures were 20% and 12%, and for weakness they were 53% versus 33%.
Myalgia, or muscle aches and pains, were experienced by 24.7% of the non-COVID group and by 40% of the COVID group.
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