Background and Objectives: To investigate whether
coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) survivors who had different disease severities have different levels of pulmonary sequelae at 3 months post-discharge. Methods:
COVID-19 patients discharged from four hospitals 3 months previously, recovered asymptomatic patients from an isolation hotel, and uninfected healthy controls (HCs) from the community were prospectively recruited. Participants were recruited at Wuhan Union Hospital and underwent examinations, including quality-of-life evaluation (St. George Respiratory Questionnaire [SGRQ]), laboratory examination, chest computed tomography (CT) imaging, and pulmonary function tests. Results: A total of 216 participants were recruited, including 95 patients who had recovered from severe/critical
COVID-19 (SPs), 51 who had recovered from mild/moderate disease (MPs), 28 who had recovered from
asymptomatic disease (APs), and 42 HCs. In total, 154 out of 174 (88.5%) recovered
COVID-19 patients tested positive for serum SARS-COV-2
IgG, but only 19 (10.9%) were still positive for
IgM. The SGRQ scores were highest in the SPs, while APs had slightly higher SGRQ scores than those of HCs; 85.1% of SPs and 68.0% of MPs still had residual CT abnormalities, mainly ground-glass opacity (GGO) followed by strip-like
fibrosis at 3 months after discharge, but the pneumonic lesions were largely absorbed in the recovered SPs or MPs relative to findings in the acute phase. Pulmonary function showed that the frequency of lung diffusion capacity for
carbon monoxide abnormalities were comparable in SPs and MPs (47.1 vs. 41.7%), while abnormal total lung capacity (TLC) and residual volume (RV) were more frequent in SPs than in MPs (TLC, 18.8 vs. 8.3%; RV, 11.8 vs. 0%). Conclusions: Pulmonary abnormalities remained after recovery from
COVID-19 and were more frequent and conspicuous in SPs at 3 months after discharge.