Nonilex
Manlio De DomenicoWhat is the prevalence of long COVID? And why different estimates often disagree(d) w/ each other? What's the role of vaccination?
The choice of the reference group is fundamental to understand the prevalence and to compare distinct groups within and across countries.
We performed a large-scale ecological analysis and developed a statistical method to reconcile distinct estimates, gaining insights on the prevalence trend. Overall, we find:
- consistent trend estimates across the UK and the US for distinct age groups, with higher prevalence in the US
- vaccines have a positive, but limited, benefit in reducing the prevalence of long COVID
- 7x increase between 2020 and 2022
- some regions of the world are more affected than others
Our study is ecological, but provides a grounded way to compare the prevalence across distinct countries & distinct age groups. Our results are:
- numerically, in great agreement with patient/cohort-based estimates.
- consistent across the globe
- affected by some limitations, anyway.
This study can be of interest for @LongCovidKids @longcovidsos @longcovid @erictopol
Paper: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0001917
Prevalence of long COVID decreases for increasing COVID-19 vaccine uptake
Long COVID is a post-COVID-19 condition characterized by persistent symptoms that can develop after SARS-CoV-2 infection. Estimating and comparing its prevalence across countries is difficult, hindering the quantitative assessment of massive vaccination campaigns as a preventive measure. By integrating epidemiological, demographic and vaccination data, we first reconcile the estimates of long COVID prevalence in the U.K. and the U.S., and estimate a 7-fold yearly increase in the global median prevalence between 2020 and 2022. Second, we estimate that vaccines against COVID-19 decrease the prevalence of long COVID among U.S. adults by 20.9% (95% CI: -32.0%, -9.9%) and, from the analysis of 158 countries, by -15.7% (95% CI: -18.0%, -13.4%) among all who had COVID-19. Our population-level analysis complements the current knowledge from patients data and highlights how aggregated data from fully operational epidemic surveillance and monitoring can inform about the potential impact of long COVID on national and global public health in the next future.
Itamar Medeiros
EU Medicines Agency