Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. To describe and compare the initial clinical characteristics of a cohort of patients with suspected COVID managed by general practitioners GPs ; to assess whether 3-month persistent symptoms were more frequent among confirmed cases than among no-COVID cases; and to identify factors predictive of persistent symptoms and adverse outcomes among confirmed cases.
A comparative, prospective, multicentre cohort study in primary care in the Paris region of France. Initial symptoms, COVID status, persistent symptoms 3 months after inclusion and a composite criterion for potentially COVIDrelated events hospitalisation, death, emergency department visits. At 3 months, we observed 16 9.
Although most patients with COVID in primary care had mild disease with a benign course, almost one in six had persistent symptoms at 3 months. Our findings need to be confirmed in a prospective study with longer follow-up. This work is one of the few French studies to have included solely patients managed in primary care early on in the first wave of the COVID pandemic.
The large number of primary care centres involved in the study suggests that our results can be extrapolated to the local and regional levels. The small size of some subgroups eg, the subgroup of patients with persistent symptoms might have led to a lack of statistical power and thus prevented us from drawing formal conclusions in that respect. General practitioners GPs were in the front line 1 ; they referred severe cases to hospital and managed less severe cases. However, these studies were fully 3—8 or partly 9 conducted in hospital.
The most frequently reported initial signs were fever, cough and dyspnoea. All patients received an information sheet and gave their verbal consent to participation. They were not involved in the study design, conduct or reporting or the plans for dissemination. The first patient was included on 6 March , and the last was included on 12 May Three months after inclusion, the GP phoned or visited patients to collect data on persistent symptoms or recovery.
