Most people with “long COVID” following a mild case of the COVID-19 virus see their symptoms disappear after a year, according to a new study from Israel.
“Long COVID” is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as the long-term effects of a COVID infection, according to the agency’s website.
The study, published January 11, 2023 in The BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical journal, examined 1,913,234 patient records from Israel’s HMO Maccabi Health Services.
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The nearly 2 million patients were all tested for COVID-19 during the period between March 2020 and October 2021.
About 300,000 of those patients have tested positive for the coronavirus. The researchers then compared these patients to similar patients who did not test positive for the virus.
A Salt Lake County Health Department COVID-19 testing staff member performs a nasal swab test on a patient outside the Salt Lake County Health Department on Jan. 4, 2022, in Salt Lake City.
(Associated Press/Rick Bowmer)
The study authors created a list of 70 “long COVID” symptoms and reviewed patient records to see if those symptoms persisted after a coronavirus diagnosis.
Anyone hospitalized with COVID-19 was excluded from the study, as they were deemed not to have a “mild” case of the virus.
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“We really wanted to understand what the long-term effects of this infection are on the majority of the population and whether we should expect a significant burden on healthcare providers,” said lead author Maytal Bivas-Benita. and lead author Barak Mizrahi. e-mail common to the health information site STAT.
The study results were unexpected, Bivas-Benita and Mizrahi said.
“My real concern is that long COVID may increase with recurrent infection.”
“When we analyzed the data, we were surprised to find only a small number of COVID-related symptoms that remained for a year after infection, and the small number of people affected by these,” the authors told STAT.
Most people who experienced post-COVID symptoms saw those symptoms disappear within a year, according to the recently published study.
(Stock)
Those who had mild cases of COVID-19, according to the study, had an increased risk of various health problems.
These problems included loss of smell and taste, memory and concentration difficulties, breathing difficulties, weakness, strep throat and heart palpitations.
Women in particular had a higher risk of hair loss, according to the study.
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For most of these people, however, these symptoms disappeared within a year of their COVID-19, according to the study.
Fox News medical contributor Dr. Mark Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine and practicing internist at NYU Langone Medical Center, told Fox News Digital he wasn’t too surprised by the study results.
“I see a lot of ‘post-COVID’ and look at it – and hope it goes away.”
“There is a distinction between ‘post-COVID’ and ‘long-COVID,'” Dr Siegel said. “So this study only reinforces [difference] – that most of the time, the symptoms go away.”
“I see a lot of ‘post-COVID’ and look at it – and hope it goes away. We don’t really have a good treatment for it,” he added.
The Israeli study looked at nearly two million people in Israel who were tested for COVID-19.
(Getty Pictures)
The results of the Israeli study run counter to another study indicating that mild COVID symptoms were correlated with long COVIDs, Siegel said.
He “didn’t buy” the results of this study, Dr. Siegel said – and that was not what he experienced.
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“The orthodoxy on this is that severe COVID leads to long COVID,” he said.
Another issue, he explained, is that the coronavirus pandemic is “still evolving” and more research needs to be done – and the term “long COVID” still needs a universal definition.
For Siegel, “long COVID” is “any symptom that I can attribute to COVID that lasts beyond six months.”
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What’s most concerning, Siegel said, “is that repetitive infection increases the risk of long COVID. We’re now in the phase where that’s happening.”
He also said, “My real concern is that long COVID may increase with recurrent infection.”