Concerns over long Covid as virus sweeps through young
COVID-19 is currently sweeping through children in Wales, leaving many parents concerned about long Covid.
Long Covid is when people have long-term symptoms of Covid that often do not seem to be linked to how ill you are when you first get the disease. People with mild symptoms at first can still have long-term problems.
The infection rate in every other age group apart from under-16s is either stable or falling whereas school age children are seeing a significant increase in the virus.
Following the world’s biggest study into the issue, the researchers, led by University College London, said they were “reassured”.
The study, published on the preprint site Research Square involved surveying 3,065 11 to 17-year-olds who had positive results in a PCR test between January and March as well as a matched control group of 3,739 11 to 17-year-olds who tested negative over the same period.
The research suggested that between 2% and 14% still had symptoms caused by Covid 15 weeks later. However the report said the true figure is likely to at the lower end of the scale as only 13% of those asked to completed the survey.
Researchers believed that those suffering ongoing symptoms would be more likely to fill in the survey than those not, suggesting that if all of those with long Covid had filled in the survey, the true figure for the percentage of children vulnerable to long Covid would be under 2%.
Lead author Professor Sir Terence Stephenson from UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health said: “There is consistent evidence that some teenagers will have persisting symptoms after testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. Our study supports this evidence, with headaches and unusual tiredness the most common complaints.”
Professor Stephenson added: “The difference between the positive and negative groups is greater if we look at multiple symptoms, with those who had a positive test twice as likely to report three or more symptoms 15 weeks later”.
This suggests that number of symptoms should be considered when clinicians seek to define long Covid in children.
Speaking to the BBC, Prof Stephenson, said he was already “reassured” suggestions, at the height of the pandemic, that half of children could develop long Covid cases were wrong.
“It is nowhere near what people thought in the worst-case scenario,” he said. Although, he said, the numbers were still “not trivial” and the issue needed to be taken seriously.
The researchers also found that there was no difference in mental health and wellbeing scores between children who tested positive compared to those who tested negative, but a high proportion in both groups reported being a bit or very worried, sad or unhappy (41% of people who tested positive versus 39% of those who tested negative).
The research team sent questionnaires to about 220,000 young people and received 17,000 responses.
This study drew on the responses of nearly 7,000 of those who were tested between January and March, excluding those who were tested earlier (September to December) and therefore at greater risk of recall bias.
For later studies, the researchers will analyse survey results at six months, a year and two years from the time of the PCR test.