By: REARDON, S.,
Nature NEWS

Sara Reardon is a freelance science journalist from Bozeman, Montana with a role as a staff reporter at high-profile scientific journals including Nature, New Scientist and Science.

The findings in a nutshell

Long COVID is difficult to define and diagnose as a result of the wide variety of potential symptoms, which also makes it challenging to study from a research perspective.

It seems that previous estimations of Long COVID prevalence may have been inflated, with a very large study recently finding:

7% of 4.5 million people treated for COVID went on to present with Long COVID symptoms

This is in contrast to previously reported rates of up to 30% of those who have been infected by COVID.

Other evidence has shown that vaccination does reduce the likelihood of Long COVID in people previously infected, but by only around 15%. For those who do go on to develop Long COVID, being vaccinated does not seem to change how you experience Long COVID (type and severity), as demonstrated by the large cohort study.

Overview of the paper

This article cites five high profile research studies recently published in top scientific journals to present an evidence-based perspective on the effectiveness of currently available COVID-19 vaccines in protecting individuals against Long COVID and the implications of those findings.

Implications for Australian workplaces

Taken together, this new evidence of limited protection against Long COVID by vaccines places more importance on other measures such as mask wearing and social distancing especially in high traffic and highly populated areas of the workplace. Only then can we limit the number of people placed at risk of Long COVID, particularly those with compromised immune systems.

To find out more about Long COVID risk falls only slightly after vaccination read the full article here.

Date published: 25 May 2022