RESULTS
The study included 440 individuals. Among these participants, 40.9%
were male, 59.1% were female as well as 33.2% had at least one long
COVID symptoms, 44.5% were reported that symptoms continued for 1-3
months. Characteristics of the participants are presented in Table 1.
Among the prolonged COVID symptoms, fatigue/tiredness was shown with
53.2%. Other common symptoms were muscle pain (27.1%),
headache/dizziness (24.1%), difficulty thinking or concentrating
(20.9%), difficulty in breathing and heart palpitation (20.0%) (Figure
1).
The median age was 41 years. The body mass index (BMI) was 24.6
kg/m2. The median time since first infected was 7
month. The median COV19-QoL and Perception of Health Scale scores were
3.0 and 40.0 respectively (Table 2).
The COV19-QoL median score was 3.3 among individuals with under high
school education, and the effect of the pandemic on the quality of life
was the greatest level (p<0.05). The median COV19-QoL score
for those with existing chronic disease was 3.3 and was significantly
higher than those without chronic disease (p<0.001). The
median COV19-QoL score in hospitalized patients was 4.3, while it was
2.6 in home-isolated patients. There was a significant difference
between COV19-QoL median scores according to COVID-19 treatment type
(p<0.001). The proportion of participants who experienced five
or more symptoms was 8.6%, with a median COV19-QoL score of 3.6 and
significantly higher than those with fewer symptoms (p<0.001).
In the group, 10.5% of participants experienced symptoms for 7 months
or longer with the significantly highest COV19-QoL median score was 4.5
(p<0.001). COV19-QoL levels did not vary by gender, marital
status, working and smoking status (p>0.05) (Table 3).
There was significant correlation between COV19-QoL and age, time since
first infected and PHS score (p<0.05) (Table 4).