Prevalence of Long COVID-19 among Home-treated COVID-19 Patients in Baghdad, Iraq 2023, 2025, Majid et al

Prevalence of Long COVID-19 among Home-treated COVID-19 Patients in Baghdad, Iraq 2023

Majid, Ali Maher; Al-Rubaey, Mazin Ghazi Jassim; Jasim, Saeb

Background:
The term “long-COVID-19” describes the condition of individuals who have either recovered from the acute phase of COVID-19 but are still reporting persistent effects of the infection, have had recurrence of the initial clinical symptoms, or have new symptoms other than the initial symptoms. The prolonged course of the COVID-19 illness is a problem that is becoming more widely noticed, affecting both health and economic systems.

Aim of the Study:
To establish base-line data for health policy makers to prevent and control this important public health problem.

Methodology:
A cross-sectional study design was adopted for this study. The study was conducted in 39 health-care centers selected randomly in Baghdad from ten health districts. In the first stage, ten health districts were chosen by a simple random sampling method. Then, in the second stage, a simple random sampling method selected 50% of primary health-care centers from each district. A convenient sample of 600 participants was involved in the study. The collection of the data was completed within 10 months (from January 2nd to the end of October 2023). A level of P < 0.05 considered significant in both univariate and multivariable analysis performed in this research.

Results:
The current study revealed that 231 out of 600 (38.5%) participants had persistent symptoms for more than 4 weeks after the onset of illness. The symptoms that had persisted for more than 4 weeks were: fatigue in 145 out of 600 (24.1%), cough in 98 out of 600 (16.3%), and loss of smell or taste in 93 out of 600 (15.5%). By Chi-square test analysis, statistically significant association was found between the duration of illness and: age, sex, smoking history, presence of chronic diseases, COVID-19 vaccination before infection, reinfection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and obesity. On logistic regression analysis only increasing age (odds ratio [OR] 1.678, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.089–2.586), female sex (OR 2.676, 95% CI 1.829–3.916), smoking (OR 2.878, 95% CI 1.964–4.216), and COVID-19 vaccination before infection (OR 0.560, 95% CI 0.387–0.811) were significant factors.

Conclusions:
More than one-third of participants (38.5%) had long COVID. The most frequent symptoms that persisted for more than 4 weeks in this study were fatigue, followed by cough, and loss of smell or taste, respectively. The increasing age, female sex, smoking were significant risk factors, in contrast to COVID-19 vaccination before infection was significant protective factor.

Link (Iraqi Journal of Community Medicine) [Open Access]

 

Yeah. That just normal recovery if you’re lucky with virus like this one.