Your Chance of Full Recovery From Long-Covid is Not 100%

Chances of long-Covid recovery also become slimmer with female sex, obesity, older age, more severe Covid-19, and past the 5–6-month mark post-Covid.

Shin Jie Yong, MSc (Res)
Microbial Instincts

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When SARS-CoV-1 emerged 20 years ago in China, no one anticipated the disease could cause long-SARS. When SARS-CoV-2 — the causative agent of Covid-19 — appeared 3 years ago, barely anyone anticipated it could cause long-Covid. Same coronavirus family, the same oversight.

Back then, about 40% of SARS survivors were found to have persistent fatigue two years later, of which 27% met the criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome. About 13% of SARS survivors still had impaired lung function 15 years later.

Now, how long might long-Covid last?

Due to an overabundance of long-Covid studies in the literature, I will only select and discuss studies of sufficient quality, such as having adequate sample sizes and follow-up time and, crucially, little sampling bias. Briefly, I keyed in (long-covid OR post-covid-19 syndrome) AND recover* into PubMed and derived and screened 438 papers as of 2 April 2022.

I also won’t be discussing the prevalence of long-Covid here as I already did elsewhere: “Current Long-COVID

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Microbial Instincts
Microbial Instincts

Published in Microbial Instincts

Decoding the microbial angle to health and microbial world (under Medium Boost program).

Shin Jie Yong, MSc (Res)
Shin Jie Yong, MSc (Res)

Written by Shin Jie Yong, MSc (Res)

Named Standford's world top 1% scientists | Medium's boost nominator | National athlete | Ghostwriter | Get my Substack: https://theinfectedneuron.substack.com/