Basically: The majority of workers with long covid were infected after vaccination, missed twice as much work as people without long covid, were infected with an omicron variant, and had a “mild” infection.

Three-quarters of the survey participants revealed that they had experienced one or more episodes of COVID-19 since the start of the health crisis. Ten per cent reported symptoms that had lasted more than 12 weeks and were still present.

More than half of the health-care workers affected by long COVID had been experiencing symptoms for more than a year at the time of the survey, and 19 per cent of them for more than two years. A third of the workers were living with severe symptoms, and 14 per cent had to cope with three or more severe symptoms.

The researchers found an association between the severity of symptoms experienced during the acute phase of the infection and the severity of symptoms of long COVID.

Seventy-one per cent of health-care workers affected by long-form COVID said that their state of health now interferes with their ability to work, and 16 per cent said that they are now often unable to work.

A fifth said they had missed at least four weeks of work in the past year, twice as many as among workers without long COVID. A similar proportion consider themselves to have a “poor or very poor” ability to perform the physical or intellectual demands of their job.

The majority of cases of long COVID in health-care workers were detected in employees who had been infected with the virus since the emergence of the Omicron variant, who had been vaccinated, and whose state of health had not required hospitalisation.