Queenslanders with long Covid may experience no more severe symptoms than those of lingering influenza, according to a study by the state’s health officials.
But while the Queensland government has held up the study as evidence its handling of the early stages of the pandemic was “textbook”, medical experts treating patients for long Covid say it is only a “first step” towards understanding a condition that has been debilitating for many.
Experts agree that there is mounting evidence that up-to-date vaccinations are helping to protect people against prolonged Covid symptoms.
The unpublished study by the Queensland Department of Health was accepted by the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, held in Copenhagen this week.
However Prof Steven Faux, a co-lead of the long Covid clinic at St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney, said it was “a little premature” to assess “the scientific integrity” of research that was yet to be peer reviewed, or publicly released.
The study followed a group of almost 2200 adults diagnosed with Covid and about 950 with influenza, during concurrent waves of Omicron and the flu in mid-2022, when more than 90% of Queenslanders had been vaccinated against Covid-19.
Over 12 weeks, researchers asked the participants about ongoing symptoms and functional impairment.
Of those with Omicron, 21% reported ongoing symptoms at 12 weeks and 4% reported moderate to severe functional limitations in everyday life. This compared to 23% of those with influenza who reported ongoing symptoms and 4% with moderate to severe functional limitations.
Queensland’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, lauded the results of the study on Monday, saying her government’s policy of strict border control until the state had achieved high vaccination rates now appears to have helped suppress the severity of long-Covid symptoms.
The state’s health minister, Yvette D’Ath, said the study showed Queensland was “a textbook example of how to respond to a one-in-100-year pandemic”.
“The study is also a reminder that the best way we can continue to protect ourselves is remaining up to date with vaccinations,” she said.
Faux agreed with that sentiment, but said there was no indication as to whether the two cohorts had been matched in terms of gender and comorbidity and that long Covid could only be diagnosed after 12 weeks.
“Then we’ve got to have the persistence of the symptoms for two months and you’ve also got to have an exclusion of any other causation for the symptoms,” he said. “And none of that was done.”
The state’s health department told Guardian Australia it had plans to monitor the same cohort of patients for 12 months and that those results would be reported later this year.
Rehabilitation physician at the Wesley hospital long Covid clinic, Dr Polly Tsai, said she would be more interested in the results of a study that ran for 52 weeks.
“I think that’s when we will probably get the picture of what the long Covid is,” she said.
Tsai said the Brisbane-based clinic had treated more than 100 people of all ages, genders and levels of health, including previously fit and healthy people in their 20s whose lives had been severely affected by long Covid for periods of up to two years.
“This certainly can significantly impact on their mental health, when they feel that no one understands them and they feel very lonely on their journey,” she said.
The health department said the study had been submitted to a medical publication and, as such, was still subject to peer review.
The department said it hoped the research would be released as an unreviewed preprint “in the coming days”.
Faux said it was a “first step” towards urgently needed research.
“We do need to start researching long Covid,” he said.
“Clearly, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.”
