By Professor Dr Moy Foong Ming

Long COVID is a range of symptoms that continue for weeks or months beyond the initial COVID-19 illness. Long COVID can happen to any COVID-19 patients, even patients who are not hospitalized and who have mild illness can experience persistent or late symptoms. Some patients develop medical complications that may have lasting health effects.

From the preliminary results of our study on Long COVID among COVID survivors (n=487), about one third perceived that they were not in good health currently compared to before COVID-19 infection.

Upon recovery from COVID, the most common symptoms reported were fatigue (72.3%), followed by difficulty in thinking / concentrating (59.6%), joint/muscle pain (47.1%), insomnia (45.5%), feeling anxious (42.9%) and depressed (39.3%). Other common symptoms were cough (38.4%), feeling sick (35.8%), loss of smell /taste (35.3%), increased heartbeat (33.2%), difficult breathing (33%), weight loss (31.9%), dizziness on standing (31.8%) and headache (30.6%).

Thirty percent of them experienced some of the above symptoms up to six weeks post recovery, while ten to twenty percent and about ten percent respondents experienced these symptoms up to three months or six months respectively.

About one third of the respondents complained that these symptoms affected their work productivity where they had to reduce their work hours (64.3%) or take leave (30.8%) from work.

Do you as a COVID survivor had similar or different experience? Do participate in our survey in order for a better representation of COVID survivors, which will yield more accurate and valid findings. This survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete and it is anonymous.

Link to survey: https://redcap.link/scwzmfna 

For those who are lucky not to get infected with COVID-19, do practice all SOPs and take vaccination in order to protect you and your love ones. To avoid Long COVID is to avoid being infected with COVID-19.

(Professor Dr Moy Foong Ming, Department of Social & Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya.)