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).