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Long-COVID Rates Vary Throughout the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic

Verena Nunhofer, Alexandra Domnica Hoeggerl, Lisa Weidner, Georg Zimmermann, Natalie Badstuber, Christoph Grabmer, Christof Jungbauer, Nadja Lindlbauer, Heidrun Neureiter, Nina Held, Tuulia Ortner, Maria Flamm, Jürgen Osterbrink, Eva Rohde, Sandra Laner-Plamberger

The infection with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) frequentlycauses a broad range of long-lasting symptoms. This condition, termed long-COVID, influences everyday life of affected individuals in many ways and causes a high economic burden. There is urgent need to obtain better understanding of the risk factors that contribute to the development of long-COVID. Aim of this study was to investigate the long-COVID rate of supposedly healthy adults during different phases of the pandemic. Therefore, 71,670 blood donations were screened for SARS-CoV-2 total anti-N antibodies between 5^th June 2020 and 30^th November 2022. 351 individuals could be recruited for our study to monitor long-COVID symptoms and their duration. Despite immense worldwide efforts to stop virus dissemination, our data reveal a constantly rising SARS-CoV-2 anti-N seroprevalence rate in Salzburg, Austria, peaking at 84.9% in October 2022. In addition, our data demonstrate varying rates of long-COVID in the course of the pandemic. While long-COVID rates were about 20% for the time span between March 2020 and August 2021, long-COVID was reported by 12% for infections from September 2021 to August 2022. This could be attributed to different virus variants, but also to increasing vaccination rates. We further found that long-COVID symptoms decline over time: while 18% of our study participants described persisting symptoms 3 months after the seropositive blood donation, 14% reported persisting symptoms 9 months afterwards and 3% after 18 months. In conclusion, our data reveal that long-COVID symptoms may persist for more than a year after a SARS-CoV-2 infection and that long-COVID rates are varying in the course of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.