Long COVID-19 prevalence among a sample of infected people in Erbil city.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Long-term effects of the disease were founded and described as post-COVID-19 syndrome post-COVID syndrome are the symptoms that develop and last for four weeks or even months and cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis; symptoms may remain for >3 months. The cause of persistent symptoms is unclear. Objectives: This study aimed to Estimate the prevalence of residual symptoms among a sample of people infected with COVID-19 who survived and recovered in Erbil city and to find out the relation between the severity of the disease and post-COVID-19 syndrome. And to know the incidence of post-COVID-19 syndrome in chronic disease patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 6 primary health care centers in 6 municipalities in Erbil city, Kurdistan region, Iraq. A convenience sample of randomly selected 300 patients was involved in the study depending on inclusion criteria. For one year, starting from March 1, 2021, until the end of February 2022. RESULTS: The prevalence of post-COVID syndrome among the 300 cases was 54.67%. Of these cases, 11.7% had one symptom, 26% had two signs, and 17% had with three or more symptoms. There was a significant statistical association between persistent symptoms and the severity of COVID-19. Also, there was a substantial statistical association between persistent symptoms and chronic disease, most (67.9%) respondents with post-COVID-19 syndromes suffered from chronic disease, and the p-value was 0.001. There was a significant statistical association between persistent symptoms and disease duration; most (73%) of cases with post-COVID-19 syndrome got the disease from 7 to 14 days, while 54.5% of them struggled with COVID-19 for >14 days. CONCLUSION: Most people who have recovered from COVID-19 have many long-lasting symptoms that make it hard to go about their daily lives. This is now called a post-COVID syndrome. Getting to this status could have been caused by several things. Age, gender, whether a person has a chronic disease, disease severity, and duration are all things to consider, Even though all COVID-19 victims should be kept an eye on for long-term evaluation and treatment of post-COVID symptoms.