A series of new studies show the high likelihood and potentially severe effects of ‘long COVID’. 

Research from The Netherlands suggests one in eight adults (12.7 per cent) who catch COVID-19 may experience long COVID.

The study compared the frequency of new or severely increased symptoms among people with COVID and people who have never caught COVID, and found that 21.4 per cent of adults with COVID experienced symptoms three to five months after their infection, compared to 8.7 per cent of uninfected people in the same time period, suggesting one in eight COVID-19 patients (12.7 per cent) in the general population experience long term symptoms due to COVID-19. 

The main symptoms of long COVID are chest pain, difficulties breathing, pain when breathing, painful muscles, loss of taste and smell, tingling extremities, lump in the throat, feeling hot and cold, heavy arms and/or legs, and general tiredness.

A separate study from Italian researchers has found 1 in 40 COVID-19 patients still cannot taste or smell 2 years later. 

The survey of 119 COVID-19 patients who reported alterations to their sense of taste and smell as an initial symptom of the disease found three patients (2.5 per cent) whose symptoms were unchanged or even worse two years down the track. 

One hundred and five (88.2 per cent) patients said their senses were back to normal after two years, while 13 (10.9 per cent) took more than six months to get their senses back. 

Overall, among a larger group of 174 patients, 47 (27 per cent) still had at least one symptom of COVID-19 at the two-year point, with the most common non-taste and smell-related symptom being fatigue, in 31 patients (18.5 per cent).

A third study from the USA has found that children and teens who have had COVID are at greater risk for blood clots, heart problems, kidney failure, and Type 1 diabetes. 

Researchers with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) examined the electronic health records of nearly 800,000 US children aged up to 17 who had COVID between 2020 and 2022, and compared them with nearly 2.5 million children who had not been diagnosed with COVID.

They found that young people who had had COVID-19 were about twice as likely to experience a blood clot in the lung, and nearly two times more likely to experience myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle; cardiomyopathy, or blood clots in veins - in the year following their illness.

Those who had been infected were also about 1.3 times as likely to experience kidney failure, as well as Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disorder that destroys the pancreas’s ability to make insulin, according to the study.