Introduction:
As documented in cases with other viral infections, it is expected that a good portion of COVID-19 survivors will suffer from some form of post-COVID fatigue. However, the researchers and the community are still in the dark about the prevalence of post-COVID-19 fatigue and associated factors for the persistent symptoms. Chronic tiredness is the most common manifestation of fatigue. The fatigue may be reported as muscle weakness, slowed reflexes and responses, impaired decision-making and judgment, dizziness, sleep disturbance, and a majority of these remain undiagnosed (Perin et al., 2020; Griffith & Zarrouf, 2008). It usually settles after 2 or 3 weeks of viral illness; however, it can linger for weeks or months in some people. The exact mechanism of fatigue is unknown and multifactorial theories are well accepted (Cho et al., 2006; Tanriverdi et al., 2007).
The long term consequence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV) that emerged from South East Asia in early 2003 was assessed in a Toronto study. It showed a good percentage of survivors experienced fatigue even after one year of the initial infection (Moldofsky & Patcai, 20211). In a similar follow-up study in Hong Kong, over 40% of respondents from 233 SARS survivors reported a chronic fatigue problem 40 months after infection (Lam et al., 2009). During the Middle-Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreak, a longitudinal study revealed that many MERS survivors suffered from chronic fatigue even more than one year after the outbreak in South Korea. The prevalence rate of CFS was about 32.7% at 18 months after the MERS outbreak (Lee et al., 2019).
The study on fatigue syndrome among COVID-19 survivors is limited. A recent study in Ireland assessed the prevalence of fatigue in patients recovered from the acute phase of COVID-19 illness using the Chalder Fatigue Score (CFQ-11); more than half of affected people were reported to have persistent fatigue (67/128; 52.3%) at the median of 10 weeks after initial COVID-19 symptoms (Townsend et al., 2020). This was a small study and involved both admitted and non-admitted COVID patients. We wanted to assess if the Irish study’s result is replicated in more extensive research in Bangladesh. Moreover, our study also aimed to look into other associations and predictors of post-COVID 19 fatigues, which were not evaluated in most other studies.