Covid Can Remain Active For Longer Than Recommended Quarantine Period: Study Reveals

The study 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.

Written by: India.com News Desk Edited by: Analiza Pathak

Updated: January 29, 2022, 9:57 AM IST

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Covid Can Remain Active For Longer Than Recommended Quarantine Period: Study Reveals

New Delhi: 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.

The study 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.

What does the study say?

1. Of the 38 cases 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, researchers 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
2. 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.
3. This is not the first evidence that the virus can remain active for longer than expected even in patients with mild symptoms.
4. The risk appeared to be even greater for people with compromised immune systems. In a paper published in June 2021, researchers at the same university’s Medical School (FM-USP) described a case of infection that lasted at least 218 days.

An article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in early December 2020 reported the case of an immunocompromised 45-year-old man with an autoimmune blood disorder in whom the virus continued to replicate for 143 days. And an article published in Cell in late December outlined a case study of a female leukaemia patient in whom the virus continued to replicate for at least 70 days, although she had no symptoms of Covid-19.

In the study led by Minoprio, the difference between women and men in terms of the duration of viral activity was not significant (averaging 22 days and 33 days respectively). As for the three atypical cases, the virus remained detectable for 71 days in the woman and 81 days in one of the two men. None of them had comorbidities and all had mild symptoms of Covid-19.

The other atypical man continued to test positive for coronavirus for 232 days (April-November 2020), after which he tested negative three times by RT-PCR. He had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, since 2018 but had no detectable viral load thanks to antiretroviral therapy.

“The fact that he’s seropositive for HIV doesn’t mean he’s more susceptible to other infections, as he has undergone the therapy since he was diagnosed. His capacity to respond to an infection by another agent is comparable to that of any other individual, and indeed he did respond to coronavirus when infected. He isn’t immunosuppressed like cancer patients, people with autoimmune diseases or transplantees, for example,” Minoprio said.

According to the researchers, his HIV-positive status does not explain the long duration of his coronavirus infection. Many patients infected concurrently by HIV and SARS-CoV-2 would have to be compared with an appropriate control group in order to see if any genetic or immune traits in the host could be associated with such prolonged viral shedding.