Blood cancer patient who carried the virus for about 105 days

 

US Cancer Patient Carried Coronavirus For 105 Days With No Symptoms: Study

According to the study, understanding how long people can remain actively infected is important since it provides new details about Covid that are still not well understood.

New York: 

While most people infected with the novel coronavirus actively shed the pathogen for about eight days, scientists have reported an unusual case of a blood cancer patient who carried the virus for about 105 days, "and remained infectious for at least 70", without experiencing any symptoms the entire time.

According to the study, published in the journal Cell, understanding how long people can remain actively infected is important since it provides new details about COVID-19 that are still not well understood.

"At the time we started this study, we really didn't know much about the duration of virus shedding," said senior author of the study Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US.

"As this virus continues to spread, more people with a range of immunosuppressing disorders will become infected, and it's important to understand how SARS-CoV-2 behaves in these populations," Mr Munster said.

The patient from Kirkland, Washington, had been infected very early in the COVID-19 pandemic and had had numerous positive PCR tests for the virus over a period of weeks, the study noted.

According to the researchers, the patient, a 71-year-old woman, was immunocompromised due to chronic blood cancer but never showed any symptoms of COVID-19.

She was found to be infected with the virus when she was screened after being admitted to the hospital for severe anemia, and her doctors recognised that she had been a resident of a rehabilitation facility experiencing a large outbreak.

As the researchers studied samples that were regularly collected from the patient's upper respiratory tract, they found that the infectious virus continued to be present for at least 70 days after the first positive test, and the woman didn't fully clear the virus until after day 105.

"This was something that we expected might happen, but it had never been reported before," Mr Munster said.

The researchers believe the patient remained infectious for so long because her compromised immune system never allowed her to mount a response.