Abstract :
The tragedy of the pandemic creates an overwhelming impact on millions of lives around the globe. Data have been needed on the clinical characteristics of the affected patients which can help mitigating the challenges. To identify the prevalence of COVID-19 associated symptoms in Thi-Qar city/Iraqi during its first peak. This is a cross-sectional study comprising the first 305, 204 cases who were infected with COVID-19 and admitted in the Al-Husain teaching at-Thi-Qar governorate/Iraq during the period between February 2020 and December 2020. All cases in the study (305) were confirmed by RT-PCR. Data were collected from outpatient and inpatient. The median age of people who contracted the virus was 50 years, IQR=20 (60-40). There was no sex disparity could be observed among population we studied, as both males and females are observed to have a similar prevalence rate of infection. The prevalence of COVID-19 symptoms is significantly related to age and these symptoms are shown to occur significantly at higher percentage in middle age group between 41-60 years old. The most common symptoms were fatigue (96.7%) and fever (90.2%). These are followed by skipped meals, anosmia, SOB and loss of the taste, ranged from 63.1% to 68.9%. Hoarseness; however, was the least symptom that people suffering from, at 11.1%. Moreover, there were no patients had single symptom or nil symptoms. Finally, simultaneous occurrence of smell and gustatory dysfunction are noticed with a significant higher rate (79.9%) than the percentage of each symptom as per se, (20.1%) and (18.7%), respectively. Middle-age group is at a higher risk to contract SARSCoV-2 infection. Fever and fatigue are the most prevalent symptoms among those studied. Olfactory and gustatory impairments are common and thus otolaryngologists should be conscious about these dysfunctions.
