Variant-specific symptoms of COVID-19 among 1,542,510 people in England
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Abstract
Infection with SARS-CoV-2 virus is associated with a wide range of symptoms. The REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission -1 (REACT-1) study has been monitoring the spread and clinical manifestation of SARS-CoV-2 among random samples of the population in England from 1 May 2020 to 31 March 2022. We show changing symptom profiles associated with the different variants over that period, with lower reporting of loss of sense of smell and taste for Omicron compared to previous variants, and higher reporting of cold-like and influenza-like symptoms, controlling for vaccination status. Contrary to the perception that recent variants have become successively milder, Omicron BA.2 was associated with reporting more symptoms, with greater disruption to daily activities, than BA.1. With restrictions lifted and routine testing limited in many countries, monitoring the changing symptom profiles associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and induced changes in daily activities will become increasingly important.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.21.22275368: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has limitations. Response rates varied between 11.7% and 26.5% for rounds 2–19, so the samples may not be fully representative of, or results fully generalisible to, the population. Nevertheless, our random community sampling procedure included individuals from all of the 315 lower tier local authority areas in England in each round, ensuring wide geographical coverage and socio-economic and demographic diversity. Of those …
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.21.22275368: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has limitations. Response rates varied between 11.7% and 26.5% for rounds 2–19, so the samples may not be fully representative of, or results fully generalisible to, the population. Nevertheless, our random community sampling procedure included individuals from all of the 315 lower tier local authority areas in England in each round, ensuring wide geographical coverage and socio-economic and demographic diversity. Of those who provided valid swabs and consented to linkage in rounds 1–19 of REACT-1 (2,191,597 people in total), approximately 3% (65,915 people) participated in more than one round. On this basis, a correction factor of 1.015 could therefore be applied to the standard error estimates. We are not able to definitively identify instances of participation in more than one round among those who did not consent to linkage. However, because the consent-based estimate of the correction factor is so close to one, we feel confident reporting uncorrected SEs and confidence intervals. The symptoms surveyed were not exhaustive but, while not specific to COVID-19, were all shown to be predictive of SARS-CoV-2 swab positivity. Our analysis covers a period of 22 months, during which time background levels of natural and vaccine-acquired immunity varied substantially, making it difficult to differentiate the effect of viral mutations from the impact of vaccines and prior infection.18 As REACT-1 data collection was non-continuous, we may have captured different stages of ...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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