One in 40 people with coronavirus has symptoms lasting at least three months, Office for National Statistics figures suggest.
In April, an ONS report put the proportion at about one in every 10.
The latest, large and comprehensive analysis suggests long Covid may be less common than previously thought.
But the condition is not fully understood and still has no universally agreed definition, leading to different studies producing different figures.
The latest ONS analysis asked two groups of people – those who had tested positive for coronavirus and those who had not – whether they had:
- fever
- headache
- muscle ache
- weakness
- tiredness
- nausea
- abdominal pain
- diarrhoea
- sore throat
- cough
- shortness of breath
- loss of taste
- loss of smell
About 3% of people in the study who had tested positive had at least one of the symptoms for at least three months after infection.
Among those who had not tested positive, that proportion was 0.5%, meaning one in every 40 infected people had their coronavirus symptoms last for three months or longer.
And like many other reports, the analysis suggests women, 50- to 69-year-olds and people with other long-term health conditions are the most likely to have some of these symptoms 12 weeks after a Covid infection.
People with high levels of virus in their body when testing positive are also more likely to have long Covid, the analysis suggests.
BBC
