Brighton and Sussex Medical School

Academic Institute

1146

In support of this national response, this project will investigate prolonged Covid-19, which is when Covid-19 symptoms last much longer than the 2 weeks described in government guidance. Lots of stories are being published about people with prolonged Covid-19 where patients had a fairly mild case of Covid-19 (for example, they were not hospitalised) but who are still having symptoms 6, 10, or even 15 weeks later. Sometimes the symptoms of severe fatigue, high temperature, and chest tightness come and go, and sometimes they stay the same for a long time. This may be because these people have cleared the virus from their body but are suffering from something called ‘post-viral fatigue’ (a kind of inflammatory or immune response), or it could be that Covid-19 lasts a long time in some people. We want to help to prepare the NHS for caring for these patients. We want general practitioners (GPs) to have up-to-date information and guidance about how to best recognise and look after patients with prolonged Covid-19 and how many of these patients to expect. So we will use the C-19 Symptom Tracker app data to find out: 1. how many patients with Covid-19 have prolonged symptoms, 2. what the most common symptoms are, 3. how symptoms come and go, 4. who is at most risk of having prolonged symptoms. We will then share our results with GPs, other people who help to plan primary care services, and with the general public. We will separately develop guidance on how prolonged Covid-19 should be identified and treated.

We will examine how long symptoms last for, showing how many patients still have symptoms at various time points after symptom onset (e.g. up to 12 or 15 weeks), and using this analysis to establish a cut-off time point (measured from onset to resolution of symptoms) by which ‘prolonged Covid-19' is defined, and to estimate prevalence in people who contracted Covid-19. We will describe most common symptoms in these prolonged cases and also how symptoms fluctuate over time. We will compare these symptom profiles to known conditions such as post-viral fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), myalgic encephalitis (ME) and fibromyalgia to look for similarities and overlap. Finally, we will examine risk factors such as sociodemographics, pre-existing conditions, Covid-19 severity and known predictors of CFS to estimate who is most at risk of prolonged Covid-19. Anticipated outcomes of the project are to be able to describe the prevalence, characteristics and risk factors for prolonged Covid-19 and communicate these effectively to primary care clinicians to ensure care for these patients is well planned and appropriate.

16/06/2020

Anonymous

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