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People who got a mild case of COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic were almost three times as likely to develop blood clots, according to a new British study.

Mild COVID means the patient wasn’t hospitalized.

It brought a 2.7 times higher risk of blood clots, the study in Heart says. Those patients were 10 times more likely to die than people who didn’t have COVID at all.

Hospitalized patients fared worse – they were almost 28 times more likely to develop blood clots, the research says.

They were also almost 22 times more likely to have heart failure and 17.5 times more likely to suffer a stroke.

Hospitalized COVID-19 patients were more than 100 times more likely to die than people who did not have COVID-19.

Researchers said the risk of cardiovascular disease was highest in the first 30 days after infection.

CNBC reported on the study, saying it followed 18,000 people who got the disease in the pandemic’s first year. It compared them with 34,000 people who didn’t get it. The study ended in March 2021 and was mostly done before vaccinations began in Britain in December 2020.

“Our findings highlight the increased cardiovascular risk of individuals with past infection, which are likely to be greater in countries with limited access to vaccination and thus greater population exposure to COVID-19,” the authors of the study wrote.

Sources

CNBC: “People who caught mild Covid had increased risk of blood clots, British study finds”

Heart, a journal of the British Medical Journal and British Cardiovascular Society: “Cardiovascular disease and mortality sequelae of COVID-19 in the UK Biobank”

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