Covid-19 symptoms usually last months, large-scale Dutch survey suggests
- 99 per cent of respondents said they were still not symptom-free 79 days after first showing signs of infection
- Results tally with those of Italian study that checked for symptoms after 60 days
Only 0.7 per cent of respondents said they were completely symptom-free 79 days after first showing signs of infection, according to research published on Thursday in the European Respiratory Society’s Open Research journal.
The survey is the first to show only a partial recovery among a large sample of people, according to the researchers. It involved more than 2,100 mostly non-hospitalised people confirmed or suspected to have had Covid-19 in the Netherlands and Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.
The coronavirus that causes the disease Covid-19 has infected more than 27 million people globally, with 18 million of them having recovered, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.
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Respondents reported a median of seven symptoms when they were surveyed an average of 79 days after they first experienced signs of Covid-19, with fatigue and breathing difficulties the most common.
Some 44 per cent still had chest tightness, 38 per cent had headache, 36 per cent had muscle pain and 33 per cent had pain between the shoulder blades.