Health outcomes in people 2 years after surviving hospitalisation with COVID-19: a longitudinal cohort study

A glimpse into long COVID and symptoms

“…Hence, more comprehensive understanding of long COVID would aid policymakers and health-care systems in developing, implementing, and evaluating future policies and health resource planning reflective of the population's needs. In The Lancet Respiratory Medicine , Lixue Huang and colleagues 1 addressed this topic in a longitudinal follow-up of patients after SARS-CoV-2 infection during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between January, 2020, and May, 2021). To date, this study has the longest duration of follow-up for post-COVID-19 outcomes in patients who survived hospitalisation for COVID-19.…”

“…Huang and colleagues 1 stated that their questionnaires included the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination survey, blood specimens for complete blood count, renal function, liver function, lipid test, and routine urine; 1 however, the results of these laboratory studies were omitted. Furthermore, whether self-reported symptoms of chest pain and palpitations were corroborated by objective clinical and diagnostic findings was unclear.…”

A glimpse into long COVID and symptoms – Authors' reply

“…In our study, we described the dynamics of long COVID symptoms in COVID-19 survivors with various disease severities, which was one of our main research objectives. 1 In their Correspondence, Chengliang Yang and colleagues noted that delineating individual symptom manifestations at pre-infection and post-infection timepoints is important because some physical symptoms might have been present before SARS-CoV-2 infection. We agree with Yang and colleagues on this matter, and their suggestion that this information could help to find excess symptom burden post-SARS-CoV-2 infection.…”

“…The sequelae symptoms observed in our study, including the physical symptoms mentioned by Yang and colleagues, might not be specific to SARS-CoV-2 infection, which was acknowledged as a limitation in our published Article. 1 It is not only quite challenging to distinguish whether the observed physical symptoms were direct effects of COVID-19 or not, but also the degree of impairment related to these symptoms. To the best of our knowledge, no validated symptom questionnaire was available at the time of our study.…”

“…We mentioned the potential information bias of using self-report symptom questionnaires in our Article. 1 …”