These two patients reported having less severe symptoms the second time.

Most people who've contracted COVID-19 will be immune from the virus for at least five months and have a low risk of catching it again, according to new research. More than six in 10 people (63%) of the 1,733 patients examined experienced this problem.

A new study recently found that 'fatigue or muscle weakness, ' were among the common long-term COVID symptoms, while some also reported difficulties sleeping.

Professor Susan Hopkins, senior medical adviser at PHE and the Siren study lead, said: "This study has given us the clearest picture to date of the nature of antibody protection against Covid-19 but it is critical people do not misunderstand these early findings". They are also more likely to have abnormalities appear in their chest imaging scans, which could signal organ damage. She lived apart from her family at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

The team explained, longer-term multidisciplinary study now being conducted would help in improving the understanding and development of treatments to alleviate the long-term effects of COVID-19 "on multiple tissues and organs".

Their work, he specified, underscores, too, the essentiality of "conducting follow-up research in larger populations" so they could understand the entire spectrum of the impacts that COVID-19 can have on people.

The study performed several exams on the COVID patients to see how they were faring after their hospital stay. The discharged patients also went through some physical examinations, lab tests and a six-minute walking test to scale their tolerance levels. From the over 1,700 patients involved, 390 also completed further testing to measure lung function. The UK has recorded more than 3.2 million cases of infection. This is a reduction in the flow of oxygen from the lungs to the bloodstream. Patients had a median age of 57.0 (IQR 47.0-65.0) years and 897 (52%) were men.

"Gut microbiome composition was significantly altered in patients with COVID-19 compared with non-COVID-19 individuals irrespective of whether patients had received medication", they wrote in the British Medical Journal's publication Gut. The aim of the study was to describe the long-term health consequences of patients with Covid-19 who have been discharged from hospital and investigate the associated risk factors, in particular disease severity, it said. Among them, 6,614 people participants tested positive for antibodies against the virus, while more than 14,000 had no signs of previous infection.

"To our knowledge, this study is the largest cohort study with the longest follow-up duration for the consequences of adult patients discharged from hospital recovering from Covid-19", wrote researcher Chaolin Huang, of Jin Yin-tan Hospital, Wuhan, China, and colleagues in The Lancet, published online January 8.