ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Fatigue following acute viral illnesses is a major issue that complicates the clinical course of several epidemic and non-epidemic viral infections. There is a noticeably higher trend of patients with symptoms that persist after initial recovery from acute COVID-19. This study seeks to obtain more data about the prevalence of post-COVID-19 fatigue and the factors associated with higher fatigue frequency among patients who had COVID-19. METHODS: A single center cross-sectional study was performed between May 2021 and January 2022 at University Health, Kansas City, Missouri, USA. The Fatigue Assessment Scale (FAS) was utilized to measure post-COVID-19 fatigue. Descriptive and comparative statistics were used to describe clinical and sociodemographic features of patients. Analysis of variance (ANOVA), the chi-square test, and Fisher's exact test were used to examine the statistical association between the FAS score and other clinical and sociodemographic factors. RESULTS: One hundred and fifty-seven patients who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 and diagnosed at University Health were enrolled in our study. Overall, 72% of patients (n = 113) were female. The mean ± standard deviation of the FAS score was 21.2 ± 9.0. The prevalence of post-COVID-19 fatigue among our studied sample was 43.3%. The findings of this study suggest that female patients have a significantly higher fatigue score compared with male patients (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Post-COVID-19 fatigue is a major issue following the initial acute illness with COVID-19, with a prevalence of 43.3%. We recommend implementing standardized measures to screen for post-COVID-19 fatigue, especially among female patients.
ABSTRACT
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to evolve, so does the understanding of different presentations of disease. In this case report, we describe a patient whose presentation of COVID-19 was with acute icteric hepatitis without respiratory symptoms. This is the first case in the literature to our knowledge to report jaundice as the initial presentation of disease and adds to just a handful of cases in the literature of acute hepatitis as the sole presentation of COVID-19. Additionally, despite severe hepatitis, the patient had a benign course of COVID-19 and did not require aggressive medical care; this strays from conventional paradigms that associate severity of COVID-19 with a degree of aminotransferase elevation. The purpose of this report is to make physicians aware of acute icteric hepatitis as a presentation of COVID-19 infection and to facilitate discussion and further research in the area of COVID-19-induced hepatitis.