50% of patients with mild and moderate COVID have symptoms after 6 months – study

Nearly 50% of people who contract mild or moderate cases of COVID-19 still experience symptoms six months later, according to a new study published by Israeli researchers, to be published this month in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, evaluated 103 people over the age of 18 who had coronavirus for a six-month period between April 2020 and October 2020. People had mild to moderate symptoms, meaning they were not asymptomatic or hospitalized with a more severe case of infection. Participants were interviewed up to four times during the course of the study. “It is very scary that after six months, young people who were healthy and feeling well before the coronavirus still have symptoms,” said Dr. Sarah Israel of Hadassah Medical Center University, who helped write the report. At six months, 46% of patients had at least one unresolved symptom, most commonly fatigue (22%), changes in smell and taste (15%), or breathing difficulties (8%). The study showed that 44% of people experienced headaches. , 41% fever, 39% muscle aches, and 38% dry cough as your first COVID symptom, usually around the second day of illness onset. But many of those symptoms resolved relatively quickly. In contrast, changes in smell and taste, which usually appear around the fourth day after the onset of the disease, are among the longest lasting.

A total of 14 symptoms were included in the final analysis, 12 of which were listed as COVID-19 symptoms by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of December 2020. These include change in taste, change in odor, fever, dry cough, cough, muscle aches, headache, runny nose, sore throat, diarrhea, trouble breathing, vomiting, or nausea. Additionally, participants (53%) complained of a non-CDC-related symptom, loss of appetite. Lastly, fatigue, now listed as a CDC symptom, did not appear explicitly in the original questionnaire, but was self-reported by 18% of patients under “any other symptoms.” Israel said other symptoms that were noted by some of the patients included memory loss, hair loss and depression – “many symptoms for which it is difficult to understand why patients were experiencing these post-COVID symptoms.” The report explained that “protracted COVID is emerging as a phenomenon in which patients have long-term problems without resolving symptoms. These could be prolonged COVID-19 symptoms or a post-COVID syndrome for which dysfunction has been proposed. of the autonomic nervous system, although more research is needed to establish the causes. ” As noted, in terms of underlying medical conditions, most patients were generally healthy before contracting the virus. Two of them had high blood pressure, six had respiratory illnesses, two had heart illnesses, and 16 were clinically obese. The study had several limitations, the report explained, including that the data collection method used in the study (calling patients at various intervals) could have caused recall bias. In addition, the patients were recruited through social media and word of mouth and thus constituted a largely younger cohort with higher income and education levels. Israel said it hoped the information in the report would allow doctors to better understand COVID-19 in the long term. health complications. He also hopes it will serve to encourage young people to get vaccinated. “I think people now know that this is not an easy virus,” he said. “Even if you hardly get sick, the virus can affect you for months. The risk of side effects from the vaccine is small compared to the symptoms of the virus. Israel added that additional work needs to be done to assess whether asymptomatic patients experience similar symptoms after recovery. He also said the team hopes to continue surveying the people involved in the current study to determine when existing symptoms disappear.