Volume 26, Issue 127, September 2022

Assessment of the severity of COVID-19 symptoms after vaccination among the Saudi population suffering from chronic conditions

Azharuddin Sajid Syed Khaja^1♦, Mubashir Zafar², Mazen Almansour³, Hamod Alsohail³, Ibrahim Almansour³, Mohd Saleem¹

¹Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, University of Hail, Hail, KSA
²Family and Community Medicine Department, College of Medicine, University of Hail, Hail, KSA
³MBBS Student, College of Medicine, University of Hail, KSA

^♦Corresponding author
Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, University of Hail, Hail, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT

Since the emergence of COVID-19 disease, more than 600 million people have been affected. However, the severity and the risk of mortality of the disease were shown to depend on whether the infected individual was suffering from any other comorbidities. The present study is designed to determine a group of people with comorbidities who are more susceptible to developing severe symptoms after infection with COVID-19. We also aim to compare the side effects of different COVID-19 vaccines in the Saudi population. Here we report a statistically significant difference between the chronic medical condition of the participants and their COVID-19 status (p = 0.03). We also observed a statistically significant difference between vaccine status and COVID-19 infection, as more than 70% of the participants (n=195) were unvaccinated when they tested positive for COVID-19. In our study, most of the participants (n=856, 77.5%) took the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, while 14.7% (n=162) and 4.5% (n=50) of the participants took Oxford–Astra Zeneca and Moderna Vaccines, respectively. There were also statistically significant differences in the severity of side effects between different vaccines (p=0.001). In conclusion, severe side effects were reported after the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. In addition, the side effects, including fever, tiredness, headache, nausea, chills, pain, swelling at the injection site, body pain, and muscle pains, were reported more frequently after the vaccine's first dose, and participants with either one or more comorbidities.

Keywords: COVID-19, vaccination, comorbidities, severity of the disease

Medical Science, 2022, 26, ms382e2459

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.54905/disssi/v26i127/ms382e2459

Published: 23 September 2022