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Coronavirus: Man tests positive for 232 days
The case has been documented by specialists from the University of São Paulo (Brazil), the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Brazil) and the Pasteur Institute (France).
In the scientific journal Fronties of Medicine, an article was published showing this particular case in which a 38-year-old man tested positive for Covid-19 for 232 days.
Marielton dos Passos Cunha, the first author of the aforementioned article, commented that they tracked 38 cases, of which two men and one woman continuously presented the virus in their body.
This is not part of the first evidence that Covid-19 remains active for a long time, even in patients with mild symptoms. In 2021, Brazilian researchers reported similar cases.
Coronavirus is able to replicate in vitro
In the study, 29 samples of nasopharyngeal secretion were analyzed. These came from positive patients in the Covid-19 test, after ten days of the appearance of the first symptoms and were inoculated into cells grown in a laboratory.
Through this study, it was observed that the viruses present were capable of replicating in vitro by infecting cells.
Therefore, people can become infected by having contact with expelled saliva droplets at the time of taking the material.
The person with a compromised immune system is usually at greater risk. The researchers describe a case of contagion that lasted 218 days, in a 40-year-old person, who had undergone strong cancer treatment, before becoming infected.
In early December 2020, a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed a case of a 45-year-old man, immunosuppressed with an autoimmune blood disorder, in which the virus remained for 143 continuous days.
Likewise, the case of a patient with leukemia, who had no symptoms, and still had the virus for 70 days, was known. In the study, the difference between men and women was not striking, in terms of the duration of viral activity.
The most important cases
In the 3 atypical cases, the virus remained for 81 days in one of the two subjects and 71 days in the woman. None of the patients had secondary diseases, and they had mild symptoms of Covid-19.
The other of the three patients continued to test positive for 232 days (from April to November 2020). This patient has HIV since 2018. However, he did not have a viral load due to antiretroviral therapy.
Paola Minoprio, one of the leaders of the investigation, assured that being seropositive for HIV does not mean that they are susceptible to other infections, because the person has been in therapy since their diagnosis.
The ability to respond to another infection is like that of any person, even this time his body responded to being infected by Coronavirus.
Minoprio assured that this patient is not immunosuppressed like patients with autoimmune diseases, cancer patients or transplant recipients.
Special follow-up in this particular case
The researchers demonstrate that the condition did not express the prolonged duration of the Coronavirus infection.
Comparisons had to be made between HIV-infected and SARS-CoV-2 patients, along with a specialized control group, to determine any genetic immune traits in the person that may be associated with prolonged viral shedding.
Every week the patient was tested, in which they detected the persistence of the infection and continuous samples of the virus were perceived, in which it was shown that it was not a case of reinfection, and that it did not replicate, it simply mutated.
For this reason, they decided to design certain strategies that were later used by the coronavirus to avoid the immune system in the infection, by determining that the viral load decreased when neutralizing antibodies were increased.
In this way, the body's defenses were circumvented to continue accumulating. This cycle kept repeating itself, thus causing the reinforcement of the production of more antibodies, until the viral load was reduced again.
Cunha insisted that constant observation of this type of patient is necessary, since a little more can be learned about the mutation of the virus, and which mutations can cause worrying variants.
This patient was infected by the B.1.1.28 lineage, known as P1. This entered Brazil at the beginning of 2020. The specialists did not discover mutations in the virus that would justify its classification, as more contagious or with greater resistance to the immune system.
