75 percent of people with long covid were not hospitalized initially

•    A new study reports that 75 percent of people with long COVID were not initially hospitalized.
•    Another study estimates that 1 in 5 people between ages 18 and 64 will develop post-COVID conditions with that percentage rising to 1 in 4 for people older than 65.
•    Another study also reports that vaccinations can help reduce the risk of developing long COVID.
About 75 percent of people experiencing long COVID were not hospitalized with their initial COVID-19 illness.
A new analysis suggests that even people with mild or moderate COVID-19 cases that didn’t require hospital admission can still develop long COVID.
“We know that people who get long COVID may have a severe infection, they may be hospitalized or may even have asymptomatic infections. So, it’s not surprising that so many people with long COVID have not been hospitalized, especially if you consider that the vast majority of people with COVID-19 are not hospitalized,” Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of California Davis, told Healthline.
The analysis used data from a registry of private healthcare claims from 78,525 people.
The participants were diagnosed with long COVID between October 2021 and January 2022. The analysis showed a difference between men and women. About 81 percent of the female subjects were not hospitalized compared with 67 percent of males.
Those ages 36 to 50 were most likely to receive a diagnosis of a post-COVID condition, with women being more likely than men.
The most commonly reported long COVID symptoms were abnormalities of breathing, cough and malaise, and fatigue.
The analysis comes as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a studyTrusted Source that found 1 in 5 people between ages 18 and 64 will develop post-COVID conditions, with that number rising to 1 in 4 for those older than 65.
The potentially serious conditions include respiratory conditions, kidney failure, cardiovascular conditions, blood clots, and neurological conditions.
Blumberg says the symptoms of long COVID can vary between people and may be influenced by the symptoms a person experienced in their initial COVID-19 illness.
“Some people have, for example, lung fibrosis, inflammation of the lung that results in decreased breath and oxygen capacity, and that’ll cause more fatigue,” he said. “And other people won’t have that, they’ll have other symptoms such as loss of taste and smell that’s prolonged. And then other people will have a brain fog, a real difficulty concentrating. So it really just depends on the manifestations that are occurring in each individual.”