
He confirmed that the Delta variant has drastically reduced vaccine effectiveness. “But we are experiencing an uptick in breakthrough cases compared to several months ago.” “It remains relatively uncommon,” Hirschwerk said.

“This increased risk might therefore reflect increased exposure: unlike non-frail older adults, frail older adults might require carer visits or attendance at health-care facilities,” the study authors wrote. Two possible reasons researchers gave for this finding are that adults with frailty are often in long-term care facilities, where there’s increased risk of contracting respiratory illness, and that they have weakened immune systems due to older age. “Some, of course, will have resolution earlier.”Īccording to the study, frailty was significantly associated with breakthrough infection in older adults after their first vaccine dose. David Hirschwerk, an infectious disease specialist at Northwell Health in Manhasset, New York. “Recent reports suggest that some individuals remain with ongoing symptoms for at least a year after the infection,” said Dr. When this data was compared with reports from unvaccinated people who got COVID-19, it was found that breakthrough cases were associated with a 49 percent lower risk of symptoms lasting 4 weeks or more after infection. Researchers included a control group of unvaccinated people for comparison.Īccording to the findings of 971,504 fully vaccinated people, only 0.2 percent went on to develop a breakthrough infection.

They evaluated reports from people who had been given at least one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or AstraZeneca mRNA COVID-19 vaccine between December 2020 and July 2021. Researchers analyzed data from more than 1.2 million adults in the United Kingdom who participated in the national COVID Symptom Study. Risk of long-haul COVID-19 49% lower for vaccinated people 1 finds vaccination not only reduces the risk of infection and severe symptoms, but significantly cuts the odds of experiencing long-term effects if you’re one of the few who experience a breakthrough infection. With the rise of vaccinations, health experts have been trying to determine whether people who get breakthrough infections would be at the same risk of developing long-haul COVID-19 as unvaccinated people.Ī new study published in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases on Sept. Gut said symptoms can last weeks to months and include brain fog, fatigue, persistent loss of smell or taste, hair loss, and numbness.

“Long COVID is the syndrome of persistent symptoms that develops after the virus that causes COVID has been cleared,” Thomas Gut, DO, associate chair of medicine and director of the Post-COVID Recovery Center at Staten Island University Hospital in New York, told Healthline. But even for people who had mild symptoms, some people have been left with long-term symptoms, now called long-haul COVID-19, or “long COVID.”

COVID-19 can cause severe illness, sometimes leading to hospitalization and death.
