Back Pain among COVID-19 Positive Health Care Workers in a Tertiary Care Hospital in Nepal: A Descriptive Cross-sectional Study.

Introduction: The world has been threatened with the emergence of the Novel Corona Virus straining the health care system and creating a global pandemic. This is not the first pandemic, and it certainly will not be the last to affect humanity. As the medical community is exposed to these highly contagious new diseases with arrays of symptoms like fever, cough, shortness of breath, anosmia, insomnia, and myalgia. Back pain can also be considered as one of the symptoms of COVID-19 infection. Therefore, this study aimed to find out the prevalence of back pain among the Health care workers who were tested positive for COVID-19 by the end of their isolation period.

Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was done from April 2021 to June 2021 in KIST Medical College and Teaching Hospital, Imadol, Lalitpur, Nepal, after receiving ethical approval from the Institutional Review Committee (Registration number: 2077/078/57). Convenience sampling was done. Data collection and entry were done in Microsoft excel, point estimate at 95% Confidence Interval was calculated along with frequency and proportion for binary data.

Results: Out of 156 COVID-19 positive patients, the prevalence of back pain was seen among 64 (41%) patients (95% Confidence Interval= 42.23-57.75). Among them 21 (32.8%) were males and 43 (67.2%) were females. Likewise, the minimum age was 20 years and the maximum was 68 years with a mean of 33.5±10.28.

Conclusions: This study demonstrated that a high proportion of healthcare workers were suffering from back pain and the findings are similar to the data from other international studies.