1.4 million Canadians have experienced persistent COVID-19 symptoms: StatCan – National | Globalnews.ca

Around 1.4 million Canadian adults who know or suspect they have had COVID-19 say they have had symptoms months after becoming ill, according to new data released by Statistics Canada on Monday.

The data, released in collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), is the first national look at Canadians who have experienced long-term symptoms after testing positive for COVID-19 or suspected infection. It was collected in the second cycle of StatCan’s Canadian COVID-19 Antibody and Health Survey.

According to the survey results, as of late May 2022, nearly a third of Canadians aged 18 and over had tested positive for COVID-19 and another 8.3 percent suspected they had the virus.

Of those who know or believe they have been infected, 14.8 per cent – or 1.4 million Canadians – say they had symptoms at least three months after they were initially infected.

Fatigue was the most common symptom, occurring in nearly three-quarters of patients with long-term symptoms, followed by cough and shortness of breath at 39 percent and brain fog at 33 percent.

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More women reported persistent COVID-19 symptoms than men, but there were no significant differences across age groups.

The data also show that people who have had more severe symptoms since they first contracted COVID-19 were more likely to have had longer-term symptoms. For example, 15 percent of those who rated their initial illness as moderate reported having longer-term symptoms, while 6.3 percent who reported a mild case of COVID-19 reported longer-term symptoms.

Additionally, nearly one in three Canadians who had symptoms for at least three months after contracting COVID-19 say they recovered from their original illness before symptoms returned.

More men than women – 37 percent compared to 29 percent – said their COVID-19 symptoms had cleared and later returned, but this phenomenon also varied by age group and was lowest in those over 65.

Meanwhile, after December 2021, when Omicron became the dominant strain of the virus infecting Canadians, the number of people experiencing persistent symptoms fell by more than half.

Statistics Canada does not label these cases as “Long COVID”. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines a post-COVID-19 condition as any illness that occurs three months after the onset of symptoms that last at least two months or more and cannot be explained by any other diagnosis, including “fatigue, Shortness of breath, cognitive dysfunction, but also others and generally have an impact on daily functioning.”

Overall, the majority of Canadians rated their symptoms as mild to moderate. This was the case for nearly four in five Canadians, while 16.7 percent rated their symptoms as severe, defined as having a significant impact on their daily lives.

Statistics Canada warns that some of these results – collected between January 2020 and May 2022 – may be an underestimate because some people who were infected with COVID-19 may not have known they had contracted the virus, or received a false negative test result.

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