Investigating events following COVID-19

COVID-19 is associated with different symptoms. These symptoms usually go away within four weeks however, for some people, symptoms continue and new symptoms may develop. This is called post-COVID syndrome (or long COVID). Research to understand post-COVID syndrome is ongoing. Research has also shown that people with COVID-19 remain at elevated risk of health outcomes, such as heart attacks, up to a year after COVID-19. However, this research has mostly focused on cardiovascular disease, looked at a short time period after COVID-19, or has not considered whether people were vaccinated when they got COVID-19.

This project aims to address these gaps. We will investigate the rates of a broader range of outcomes in those with a COVID-19 diagnosis compared to those before or without a COVID-19 diagnosis in three cohorts. Our cohorts will differ by their vaccination status and the variant that people were likely exposed to - they are: the ‘pre-vaccination cohort’ (likely unvaccinated and likely exposed to wildtype or Alpha variants), the ‘vaccinated cohort’ (vaccinated and likely exposed to the Delta variant) and the ‘unvaccinated cohort’ (unvaccinated and likely exposed to the Delta variant).

Under this project, we have studied the following disease areas:

Respiratory (code)

Renal (code)

Neurodegenerative (code)

Cardiovascular (beyond a year) (code)

We previously looked at other disease areas under Project 12.

We will also conduct some methodological work alongside the above to investigate how sensitive our analyses are to the choice of confounders included in the model. This will help ensure we are using the most appropriate methodology going forward. This methodological work will use our study of cardiovascular events following COVID-19 as an exemplar (code).