Table 2.

Quotations from patients on the symptoms of long-COVID-19

Concept/domain	Respondent demographics	Quotation
Symptom: upper respiratory tract	Female, 50–59	‘I would choke on it like a bread, cracker, peanut butter, anything—pudding even, pudding would get stuck. Anything that’s thick it didn’t go down easy. If it was liquidy [stet] I got it to go down. Oatmeal would get stuck. Just like it was stuck there, and I’d be choking on it.’
Symptom: lower respiratory tract	Female, 40–49	‘So the coughing was… it felt the same as COVID. It was a dry cough. I couldn’t stop. It’d be like cough and I’d try to talk and here I’d start coughing again.’
Symptom: loss of smell and taste	Female, 40–49	‘Now the coffee to me is very sour and I have to use 4–5 sugars for that sourness in my taste buds to go away. I never had a sweet tooth but the coffee itself it tastes burnt to me, I can’t have it black like I used to.’
Symptom: systemic	Female, 50–59	‘Like, I literally could sleep all day and just lay there preferably sleeping. It just feels like I weigh 1000 pounds. I have no care for the things that need to get done. I don’t care to eat; I don’t care to work. I don’t care… It’s just a malaise, tiredness, and heaviness.’
Symptom: gastrointestinal	Female, 30–39	‘I am having issues with digestion, appetite loss, I will have food that doesn’t get digested well and just goes right through. Or I will have… issues with constipation so that’s varying.’
Symptom: neurocognitive	Female, 50–59	‘A fog comes over you and you can’t think what you’re trying to say. It’s just hard to explain. It’s a very weird feeling. You’re sitting there speaking and all of a sudden you can’t comprehend or concentrate to find the right words when you’re trying to speak.’
	Female, 50–59	‘Very much so, I am dizzy a lot. Just going up and down the stairs. I live on the second floor. I have to hang onto the railing to make sure I am not going to fall. I have to concentrate on walking down the stairs. I have to concentrate on anything that I do that requires movement from me.’
	Female, 30–39	‘I’ve had a few severe situations with my memory. For instance, when I first started experiencing it, it’s horrible that you’re used to going and just driving, simple driving and knowing your way. For me being close to home and still forgetting how to get home, not retaining that, because I am kind of new to the area but still it shouldn’t have been an issue.’
	Male, 50–59	‘Your recall is not as quick. Me trying to remember something I should remember… It comes back but it just isn’t as quick, you have to wait a little while. It’s not that you can’t remember it’s just that recall is slower.’
	Female, 50–59	‘Grabbing things and making sure I have a hold of them properly, otherwise I might not really be holding it… So I’ll be smoking a cigarette and I’ll go to take a puff of the cigarette and be like where did the cigarette go and it’s fallen out of my hand and I didn’t even know it.’