- A 71-year-old hospital patient with leukemia tested positive for coronavirus in March.
- The woman remained infected for at least 70 days.
- Case studies show that people with an immune system who get coronavirus can stay infected longer than previously thought.
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On March 2, a 71-year-old hospital patient with leukemia tested positive for coronavirus.
On average, COVID-19 patients shed infectious virus particles for about eight days. But 70 days after his diagnosis, the elderly patient was still exposed to infectious particles. By mid-June, more than 100 days later, the woman was still testing positive – meaning her body still had traces of the virus’s genetic material.
“We think that for at least 70 days, this patient would have been able to spread the virus to others,” Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Business Insider. Munster is the lead author of a recent case study about women.
Because the patient quickly became isolated in the room, he did not spread the virus to anyone else.
On November 21, 2020, a nurse in Essen, Germany, underwent P.P.E. Putting.
Thomas Lohness / Getty Images
According to a Munster study published in the journal Cell earlier this week, the 70-day period of a patient’s infectious disease is the longest seen in an asymptomatic coronavirus patient. For comparison, according to the October study, the longest period of infectious shedding is for a person with the disease.
Researchers believe that the situation aro arose because a woman’s weakened immune system could not provide significant protection against the virus. Her blood tests never showed significant amounts of antibodies, which help fight infection in most patients. But she never developed symptoms.
Immunocompromised people struggle to fight Corona virus
The case study is similar to the growing body of research that suggests that people with immune systems may share a new coronavirus, the clinical name of which is SARS-COVI-2, which is longer than those with a healthy immune system. A June study of 10 immune patients with coronavirus found that they carried viral particles for an average of 28.4 days. Regularly functioning immune people, in contrast, shed it for 12.2 days.
One reason for this is that people with more severe cases of COVID-19 carry the virus longer than other patients. Immunocompromised people are at risk of serious illness because they do not fight infections as well as people with healthy immune systems.
U.S. An estimated one million people in HIV and cancer patients are immunocompressed in some way, including those receiving chemotherapy.
A recovered coronavirus patient donates blood for plasma extraction on June 22, 2020 at the National Blood Transfusion Center to assist critically ill patients.
Amir Al Mohammedav / Getty
The patient in the new case study, had a particularly weakened immune system, Munster said. This means that an infectious period of 70 days like this is probably very rare. The woman had a 10-year history of chronic leukemia, a type of cancer that infects white blood cells, an integral part of the immune system. When she is hospitalized for anemia, one condition is often related to leukemia because it depletes red blood cells.
She also had a condition in which the immune system could not produce significant antibodies, known as hypogog maglobulinemia.
“We think this is a relatively rare phenomenon linked to the specific immune status of the patient.”
However, this may mean that long-term shedding of the virus – which is defined as being contagious for at least 20 days – may be more common in some immunocompromised people than previously thought.
“Although it is difficult to perform extrapolation from a single patient, our data suggest that long-term shedding of an infectious virus may be a concern in some immunocompromised patients,” the researcher wrote.
