Omicron Half as Likely as Delta to Lead to Long COVID: Study

People who were vaccinated at least six months prior to infection had the lowest risk of lasting symptoms in a UK study.

Written byChristie Wilcox, PhD

| 2 min read

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Self-reported data from nearly 100,000 people in the UK indicate that COVID-19 cases caused by the Delta variant were 2.4 times more likely to result in long COVID than those caused by Omicron. The research, published online yesterday (June 16) as a letter in The Lancet, claims to be the first large-scale study to examine the risk of developing long COVID from an Omicron infection.

The data came from the COVID Symptom Study app, which is run by King’s College London researchers and allows people to report symptoms and test results. In all, the researchers obtained data from 56,003 people who tested positive for COVID-19 during the Omicron wave (defined by the researchers as December 20, 2021–March 9, 2022) and 41,361 who tested positive during the Delta wave (June 1, 2021–November 27, 2021). Participants were considered to have long COVID if they reported symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, or ...

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Meet the Author

Christie Wilcox, PhD
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Christie was a well-established science blogger and writer when she was awarded a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology with a specialization in ecology, evolution and conservation biology from the University of Hawai‘i in 2014 for her research on the genetics of lionfishes. A short two years later, she published her debut book Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry, which received widespread acclaim, and after that, she fully left academia behind and established herself as a science writer and editor. She joined The Scientist in 2021 as newsletter editor and left as senior editor in 2023. She is a member of the Author’s Guild, the Northwest Science Writers Association, and the National Association of Science Writers.
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