Major medical centers nationwide trying to understand why some COVID-19 patients continue to have symptoms weeks and even months after having been diagnosed with the coronavirus.

She was diagnosed with COVID-19 in April, about a month after her symptoms — cough, congestion and extreme fatigue — began.

Jessica Dine, a lung doctor at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, said she began noticing a subset of COVID-19 patients whose symptoms lingered long after their diagnoses thanks to a hospital program called COVID Watch, a texting service that does daily check-ins with COVID-19 patients at home.

Now Dine, who is also the director of the advance consultative pulmonary division at Penn Medicine, is working with those patients to better understand their illness.

"What we need is more research to explain where the symptoms are coming from," Dine said.

"It can take a really long time to fully recover," he said, adding that it's too soon to know whether the condition will clear up eventually or whether the symptoms will continue as a chronic disease.

Miglis and his team at Stanford have begun developing a registry to track such long-term COVID-19 patients over time.

There is no specific therapy for the kind of long-term inflammation doctors suspect may be causing problems, other than medications to ease symptoms such as cough or fever.

And Dine said there is no good treatment for one of the most debilitating manifestations of COVID-19: extreme fatigue.

LeRoy, a practicing physician at the East Dayton Health Clinic in Dayton, Ohio, said he hasn't treated any COVID-19 patients with long-term symptoms

She wants other COVID-19 patients with lingering symptoms to know they're not alone

These symptoms are real," Watson said