2023-06-21 16:36:16
Fatigue, shortness of breath, headaches, anosmia (disorder of smell) and ageusia (disorder of taste)… Many people, several months after being infected with the coronavirus, continue to suffer from Covid symptoms. A survey by Public Health France estimates that around 2 million French people were affected at the end of 2022, i.e. 4% of the general population. It should be noted that this level of prevalence is the same as that observed during a previous survey in the spring of 2022.
In detail, the health agency looked into the medical course of 10,615 French adults. Among them, 48% of people said they had been infected with the coronavirus more than three months before the survey. Of these 5,130 people who had Covid, 8% presented the criteria for a post-Covid-19 condition, according to the WHO definition.
Women more affected
Looking at these people suffering from a long Covid, Public Health France noted that the prevalence of the condition was twice as high in women (10.2%) than in men (5.3%). A study published in “Current Medical Research and Opinion” published in June 2022 estimated that this could be due to the “difference in the functioning of the immune system between women and men” or even sex hormones.
“Women develop faster and more robust innate and adaptive immune responses, which may protect them from initial infection and severity. However, this same difference can make women more vulnerable to prolonged autoimmune diseases”, underlined the North American authors, recalling that women seemed less likely than men to be infected with Covid, and to be so seriously.
Older people less affected
Among the other factors, Public Health France points out that people over 65 are 2 to 3 times less affected by long Covid than others. Conversely, the prevalence is very high among hospitalized people, since 18.6% of them still had symptoms more than three months after their infection.
It should be noted that among people with a long Covid, 31% had had a condition for more than a year. One in five people (21.3%) was infected with the Delta variant (fourth wave of July 2021) and more than half (53.2%) during the waves of the Omicron variant (waves after June 2022).
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