One patient was positive for Covid-19 for 505 days before his death, making his case the longest-running coronavirus infection to date, according to British researchers.
The previous most prolonged infection is estimated to have lasted 335 days.
Most people who are infected with the virus can treat the disease on their own, but this patient had a severely weakened immune system and multiple comorbidities.
In both cases, the patients started to show symptoms and came out positive in early 2020 and were positive many times until they died.
The researchers, who studied the virus from nine Covid patients in London, also provide evidence that New mutations in Covid may occur in immunocompromised individuals.
Presenting their details at European Conference on Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Lisbon, Portugal, describe details of one of the first latent Covid infections – cases where the patient believed he had tested positive for the virus, but was later found to have a persistent infection.
The team, from King’s College London and the Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, focused on how the virus changes over time in immunocompromised individuals.
«New mutations in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, have appeared throughout the pandemic. Some of these mutations, which are more easily transmitted between humans, cause more serious illness or make vaccines less effective. One theory is that these mutations in the virus develop in people whose immune systems are weakened by diseases or medical treatments such as chemotherapy, who may have a persistent infection with SARS-CoV-2.“, Say the researchers.
The study included nine immunosuppressed patients who tested positive for the virus for at least eight weeks. Infections lasted 73 days, on average, but two patients had persistent infections for more than a year.
The patients, who participated in the study between March 2020 and December 2021, had a weakened immune system due to organ transplantation, HIV, cancer or medical treatments for other diseases.
Some of the humans developed multiple mutations, such as Alpha, Delta, and Omicron.
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