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A cancer patient was a carrier of the coronavirus for 105 days, without symptoms: case study | Photo credit: iStock Images
New York: While most people infected with the new 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 symptoms all the time.
According to the study, published in the journal Cell, understanding how long people can remain actively infected is important, as it provides new details about COVID-19 that are not yet well understood.
“At the time we started this study, we really didn’t know much about how long the virus would shed,” said study lead author Vincent Munster, a virologist at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“As this virus continues to spread, more people with a variety of immunosuppressive disorders will become infected, and it is important to understand how SARS-CoV-2 behaves in these populations,” Munster said.
The Kirkland, Washington, patient had become 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 immunosuppressed 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 examined after being admitted to the hospital for severe anemia, and her doctors acknowledged that she had been a resident of a rehab center experiencing a major outbreak.
As the researchers studied samples that were regularly collected from the patient’s upper respiratory tract, they found that the infectious virus was still present for at least 70 days after the first positive test, and the woman did not fully clear the virus until after the day. 105..
“This was something we expected to happen, but it had never been reported before,” Munster said.
The researchers believe that the patient remained infectious for so long because her compromised immune system never allowed her to mount a response.
From blood tests, they discovered that his body was never able to produce antibodies.
According to scientists, even antibody treatment of recovered COVID-19 patients had little effect on their health.
Despite his inability to mount an antibody response, he never developed COVID-19, they added.
When the scientists examined the patient to see how the virus might have changed during the course of the infection, they found that samples collected from her at various times showed different dominant genetic variants of the virus.
However, the researchers believe that these mutations did not influence the duration of the virus, as they did not see any evidence of evolution of the pathogen.
According to Munster, this could be the longest case where someone has been actively infected with the coronavirus while remaining asymptomatic.
“We have seen similar cases with influenza and with the Middle East respiratory syndrome, which is also caused by a coronavirus. We hope to see more reports like ours in the future,” he said.
