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The chances of suffering persistent Covid are between 20 and 50% lower if the SARS-CoV-2 strain is Omicron compared to the Delta variant, although age and time since vaccination are also important.
An analysis by researchers at King’s College London of data from the ZOE COVID Symptom study app is published today in a letter to The Lancet. The results come from the first peer-reviewed study reporting the risk of persistent Covid-19 and the Omicron variant.
The study identified 56,003 adult cases from the UK who first tested positive between December 20, 2021 and March 9, 2022, when Omicron was the dominant strain. The researchers compared these cases with 41,361 cases who tested positive for the first time between June 1, 2021 and November 27, 2021, when the Delta variant was dominant.
The analysis shows that 4.4% of Omicron’s cases were persistent Covid-19, compared to 10.8% of Delta’s cases. However, the absolute number of people experiencing persistent Covid-19 was actually higher in the Omicron period. This was due to the large number of people infected by Omicron between December 2021 and February 2022.
The UK Office for National Statistics estimated that the number of people with persistent Covid actually increased from 1.3 million in January 2022 to 2 million as of May 1, 2022.
Lead author Claire Steves of King’s College London said: “The Omicron variant appears to have a substantially lower chance of causing persistent Covid-19 than previous variants, but still 1 in 23 people who get Covid-19 go on to develop it. have symptoms for more than four weeks.
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