A new study has detected that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can infect a person for more than 200 days in an atypical case. The study has been published in the ‘Frontiers in Medicine Journal’.
The atypical case of infection by SARS-CoV-2 was part of a study involving 38 Brazilian patients followed on a weekly basis between April and November 2020 by researchers affiliated with the Pasteur-USP Scientific Platform, a partnership between France’s Pasteur Institute, the University of Sao Paulo (USP) and Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Brazil. The patients were followed until they tested negative twice or three times consecutively by RT-qPCR. The study was supported by FAPESP. It served 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 reinforced the significance of vaccination, social distancing, and mask-wearing.
“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 per cent 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.