A new study coming out of Brazil has raised questions about the appropriate length for quarantine periods
A 38-year-old man who manifested mild symptoms of Covid-19 for 20 days continued to host the virus for 232 days, a study from Brazil’s Pasteur-USP Scientific Platform has found.
If the man had not been given continuous medical care, maintained social distancing, and worn a mask, he could have spread the virus throughout these seven months, the researchers said.
The case was part of a study involving 38 Brazilian patients followed on a weekly basis between April and November 2020. Patients were followed until they tested negative twice or three times consecutively by RT-qPCR.
The study was supported by FAPESP. An article reporting its findings is published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine.
It serves as an alert regarding the risk of limiting quarantine for Covid-19 patients to seven, ten or even 14 days after they test positive, as initially prescribed by protocols to combat the disease. It also reinforces the significance of vaccination, social distancing, and mask wearing.
In Ireland, the self-isolation period for people suffering from Covid-19 is currently seven days.
“Of the 38 cases we tracked, two men and a woman were atypical in the sense that the virus was continuously detected in their organism for more than 70 days. Based on this result, we can say that about 8% of people infected by SARS-CoV-2 may be able to transmit the virus for more than two months, without necessarily manifesting any symptoms during the final stage of the infection,” said Marielton dos Passos Cunha, first author of the article.
The study was conducted while he was a postdoctoral intern at the Pasteur-USP Scientific Platform.
“We wanted to know if a period of 14 days was really long enough for the virus to stop being detectable. We concluded that it wasn’t. It can take a month for a patient to test negative, and in some cases included in our study the patients remained positive for 71 to 232 days,” said Paola Minoprio, one of the coordinators of the Platform and principal investigator for the study.