Identifying clusters of COVID-19 and Long Covid symptoms (UKLLC- LLC0028)

We are a team of researchers at the University of Bristol and University of Cambridge who would like to understand if symptoms of COVID-19 and Long COVID group together. We
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want to answer questions like “does having COVID-19 with a cough make it more likely that you will lose your sense of smell?” We will do this by combining data from 9 cohorts into one large dataset. The dataset will have information about when a person had COVID-19 and what symptoms they had. It will also include age and sex. We will group people according to their symptoms and to find out if age, sex or time since COVID infection makes a person more likely to have a group of symptoms.
Other researchers have done a similar study in each of the 9 cohorts separately. They found two groups of symptoms. If some symptom groups are less common, by combining data across the 9 cohorts we are more likely to identify them. Knowing which symptoms group together may help doctors to diagnose Long COVID and improve the quality of life of people that have it.