| Participants were interviewed up to four times over the course of the study. By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN Nearly half of people who contract mild or moderate cases of COVID-19 still experience symptoms six months later, according to a new study published by Israeli researchers. The research, which is slated to be published this month in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, evaluated 103 people over the age of 18 who had coronavirus between April and October 2020. The people had mild to moderate symptoms, meaning that while they were not asymptomatic, they were not hospitalized with a more severe case of the disease. Participants were interviewed up to four times over the course of the study. "It is very scary that after six months, young people who were healthy and feeling fine before coronavirus still have symptoms," said Dr. Sarah Israel of Hadassah-University Medical Center, who helped author the report. At six months, 46% of the patients had at least one unresolved symptom, most commonly fatigue (22%), smell and taste changes (15%) or breathing difficulties (8%). The study showed that 44% of people experienced headache, 41% fever, 39% muscle aches and 38% dry cough as their first COVID-19 symptom, usually around the second day of disease onset. But many of those symptoms resolved themselves relatively quickly. In contrast, smell and taste changes, which usually appeared around the fourth day after disease onset, were among the longest-lasting. A total of 14 symptoms were included in the final analysis, 12 of which were listed as symptoms of COVID-19 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as of December 2020. These include taste change, smell change, fever, dry cough, productive cough, muscle aches, headache, runny nose, sore throat, diarrhea, breathing difficulty, vomiting, and nausea. | 
