A British man who had COVID for 411 days is believed to have been the world’s longest infected and surviving member of the virus.
The patient, who has a weakened immune system after a kidney transplant, first tested positive in December 2020.
Despite losing his symptoms, he continued to test positive until January 2022.
Doctors at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in London say no other cases of healing after such long infections have been documented.
They used genetic analysis to confirm that an unnamed 59-year-old man still carries an early variant of the original Wuhan strain. It’s a thing.
Only if they identified the subspecies could they cure him Regeneronthe same drug cocktail that helped Donald Trump fight the disease.
The same team also treated a patient with underlying medical conditions who died after testing positive for 505 days.
In both cases, genetic testing showed that the patients were not reinfected.
Cases of persistent infection differ from long-term COVIDif the patient may be symptomatic for more than a few months but does not test positive.
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The teams treating the cases are calling for more research into antibody treatments for persistent COVID cases, and campaigners are calling for a new drug, Evusheld, to be made available in the UK and Europe.
“Several new strains of the virus are resistant to all antibody treatments available in the UK and Europe,” said Dr Luke Bragdon-Snell.
“Some people with weakened immune systems are still at risk of serious illness and are at risk of persistent infection. We need to understand how best to protect and treat them. I am trying to.”
The team’s findings are published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
