Washington: The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID-19 pandemic can infect a person for more than 200 days in an unusual case. This has been found in a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine. The unusual case of infection by SARS-CoV-2 was part of a study of 38 Brazilian patients conducted on a weekly basis between April and November 2020 by researchers affiliated with the Pasteur-USP Scientific Platform. The platform is a key partnership between the Pasteur Institute in France and the University of So Paulo (USP) and Osvaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Brazil.
Patients were kept under observation till their Covid-19 test report came negative two or three consecutive times by RT-qPCR. This study was supported by FAPESP (Sao Paulo Research Foundation). If seen, this study is like a warning about the risk of limiting the quarantine time for patients to seven, ten, or fourteen days after the Covid-19 report comes positive. Initially, the same number of days were earmarked for quarantine under the Kovid protocol to deal with this disease. Along with this, the importance of vaccination, social distance, and wearing of masks has been emphasized.
Virus detected in the body for more than 70 days
Marielton dos Passos Cunha, the first author to author the study, said: “Of the 38 cases we tracked, two men and one woman were abnormal in the sense that they had been in their bodies for more than 70 days. The virus was detected continuously. Based on this result we can say that about 8 percent of the people are infected with SARS-CoV-2 and they are able to spread the virus for more than two months without showing any symptoms during the last stage of infection. can.”
‘Patients remained corona positive for 71 to 232 days’
Paola Minoprio, one of the coordinators of the Pasteur-USP Scientific Platform and lead researcher of the study, said, “We wanted to know whether the 14-day quarantine period was really enough to stop the virus from being detectable. . We concluded that this time was not enough. It may take a month for a patient to test COVID-19 negative and in some cases including our study, the patient remained corona positive for 71 to 232 days.”