A new large United Kingdom study recently revealed what can reduce the risk of Long COVID. Specifically, it showed that being fully vaccinated cuts said the risk to half.
ScienceAlert reported that the study found that people who contracted the virus after getting two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were 47 less likely to experience symptoms lasting longer than 28 days.
Long-lasting symptoms include fever, insistent cough, fatigue, and loss of smell, among others. They were the ones commonly reported by the participants of the study.
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The ZOE COVID-19 Symptom Study app, with presently over 4 million users reporting the health status daily, aims to use the data fed back to Kings College London researchers, along with algorithms to predict who has the novel coronavirus and to track COVID infections across the UK.
How Full Vaccination Helps
The study also indicated that of the roughly one million fully vaccinated individuals followed, only 0.2 percent developed the infection from COVID-19, and they were about double as likely to be asymptomatic as the ones who were not vaccinated.
Nonetheless, this research also found being partly vaccinated, which means, having been vaccinated with only one out of the two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine did little to lessen the risk of developing long COVID.
The study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, included data from December last year until early July this year, a timeframe in which the Alpha variant's dominance in the UK and the onset of the Delta variant wave in the country. It did not provide details or a breakdown of the data about the variant's infection.
Vaccines have already been proven to be effective in protecting against COVID-19 infection. More so, according to a Business Insider report, it helps reduce the risk of developing severe illness. While breakthrough infections are possible to occur, they tend to be milder in fully vaccinated people.
The ZOE COVID Symptom App
As described on ZOE's website, this app has more than four million contributions at present worldwide. The study on this app is the largest ongoing work about the virus, and it is led by Tim Spector, Co-Founder of ZOE.
Through this mobile app, an individual becomes a contributor to the advancement of essential research on this global health crisis.
Through the combination of reports and software algorithms, researchers were able to predict who has COVID-19 and thus track infections of the virus across the nation and now, even other nations.
Daily reporting on this app is also being used, as earlier mention, to produce new scientific insight into the very different symptoms this virus causes in different individuals.
COVID-19 Hotspots Predicted
According to a King's College London report, collaboration with the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences has meant researchers could also foretell COVID-19 hotspots according to data gathered from the app.
Furthermore, this report indicated that the ZOE app continuously assesses data of the constantly growing population of inoculated individuals.
Recent studies have shown less than one in every 20 children who have COVID-19 had symptoms that lasted longer than four weeks.
The study showed that the infection lasted for five days in younger kids aged between five and 11 years old. Then, it lasted for seven days in older children whose age ranges from 12 to 17 years old.
Lastly, a previous assessment of the ZOE COVID Study app data presented that one in every 20 adults who have COVID-19 is likely to experience symptoms for eight weeks or longer.
Related information about the app is shown on Dr. John Campbell's YouTube video below:
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