Can the COVID-19 “breakthrough” lead to persistent symptoms?

Dr. Jennifer Possick, medical director of the post-COVID recovery program at Yale New Haven Hospital, said she was not aware of any vaccinated people seeking treatment for a long COVID at her clinic, but she expects to start seeing them soon.

“We are anticipating them for sure,” Possick said, “because the revolutionary cases otherwise behave a lot like the primary cases that we have seen.”

In Philadelphia, Dr Benjamin Abramoff, director of Penn Medicine’s post-COVID assessment and recovery clinics, said patients who had breakthrough infections came to his clinic, but in smaller numbers than those without. vaccinated.

When vaccinated people are infected with the coronavirus, their illness tends to be milder and milder illness is less likely to lead to a long COVID, he said.

“People who just have a runny nose and a sore throat are less likely to have a long COVID than those who are bedridden for a month and have severe headaches,” Abramoff said.

By preventing these more severe cases even when it doesn’t prevent infection, the vaccine lowers the risk of long-term COVID, he said.

“Certainly [vaccination] protects you from long COVID, ”said Abramoff.

A recent to study in the UK, looking at data from 1.2 million adults, confirms this notion. He found that vaccinated people were 50% less likely than unvaccinated people to still have symptoms four weeks after becoming ill with COVID-19.

“This result suggests that the risk of long-term COVID is reduced in individuals who received a double vaccination [the two recommended doses], further taking into account the reduced risk of infection already documented overall ”, the authors write in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, published September 1.

The long COVID – sometimes referred to as the post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, or PASC – is a condition or group of conditions that is little understood, in which people who have suffered from COVID-19 remain ill for weeks to months after the virus wiped out their systems. It affects around 10-30% of COVID-19 survivors, most of whom were not sick enough to require hospitalization.

In some cases, patients have failed to recover from their initial illness. Other times people feel like they have recovered, and then two weeks or a month later they are struck by a whole new set of symptoms.

Some of the most common are fatigue, brain fog, insomnia, headaches, difficulty breathing, and heart palpitations. Some people experience numbness in the limbs or lightheadedness. But fatigue and cognitive difficulties can be the most disturbing symptoms, often leaving people unable to work.

Lauren Bazensky ran everyday, easily covering 8 miles. But after contracting COVID-19 in April, the 41-year-old consultant runs out of steam walking short distances and has to analyze a limited supply of energy every day.

“I don’t have the energy to do the things that bring me joy,” she said.

She also suffers from insomnia and muscle stiffness, and most worrying is that her thinking is blurry, impaired. She has trouble finding her words.

“I no longer have access to my brain like I did before,” she said. “That’s the scary part.”

Bazensky, who lives in Chicago, said she was infected two weeks after receiving her second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. She describes herself as someone who has “a very, very weak immune system” and catches any insect that walks around.

When she described her prolonged symptoms to her doctors, they had little to offer. It wasn’t until recently that Bazensky learned of a long-running COVID clinic near her Chicago home, the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive COVID-19 Center, which she plans to visit.

The Northwestern clinic is one of the dozen that have sprung up across the country in response to a growing number of lengthy COVID cases.

In collaboration with the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 35 of these clinics – including Beth Israel’s – have trained a collaboration to develop treatment guidelines. The first guideline, on manage fatigue, was recently published.

But there are no quick fixes, and treatment usually comes down to dealing with each symptom one by one, with measures such as breathing exercises, meditation, and physical therapy.

At Beth Israel, who currently treats around 400 long-term COVID patients, most patients are improving gradually and some have improved so much that they don’t have to come back, Maley said.

There is a sure way to avoid a long COVID, said Possick, the doctor at Yale: Avoid contracting COVID-19 first. And the vaccine – along with masking and distancing, especially in areas with high transmission – remains the best way to achieve that, she said.

Felice J. Freyer can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @happyjfreyer.