Post-Acute Complications of COVID-19: An International Cohort Study (PACS) Note that in a previous iteration, this proposal was titled PACMAN as indicated in some of the Letters of Support
There are nearly 130 million COVID‑19 survivors worldwide and this number is likely to increase. Early reports suggest that COVID‑19 survivors might have symptoms that last more than a month after the infection. There is little high quality information about what these symptoms are and how common they are in COVID‑19 survivors. Also little is known about whether there are effects of COVID‑19 on physical measurements like tests of lung function, muscle strength and blood pressure that last after recovery from the initial infection. In this study, we will measure how often COVID‑19 survivors develop physical complaints and abnormalities in different physical measurements. We will conduct this study in approximately 50,000 adults from about 20 countries. We expect that about 1000 of these individuals have had COVID-19. We will be able to compare their physical complaints and measurements with the physical complaints and measurements of the roughly 49,000 study participants who have not had COVID-19. We will then use sophisticated statistical techniques to paint a picture of the “post-COVID” patient. Once we have an accurate idea of the ways in which COVID‑19 patients can be affected after they are over the initial infection, we will be able to identify what characteristics put them at risk for these late COVID‑19 complications.
