Most people who experience so-called “long COVID” as a result of mild COVID-19 infection see the symptoms fading away after a year, a large study suggests.
For the study, published on Wednesday in The BMJ, a team of Israeli scientists looked at the records of 1,913,234 patients from Maccabi Healthcare Services, a nationwide health care organization in Israel. Those patients were tested for COVID-19 from March 2020 to October 2021, before Omicron became the dominant variant of the virus.
To investigate long COVID in patients with mild infections, the researchers identified 299,870 patients who met the criteria. They then matched each patient with a person who tested negative for COVID-19 and had similar age, sex, time of test, and vaccination status, and followed the pair’s health conditions for a year….