British doctors believe they have recorded the world’s longest case of COVID-19: a patient, whose name is being withheld for ethical reasons, suffered from the disease for 505 days (more than 16 months). This person was unable to overcome the coronavirus and died in hospital in 2021. According to doctors from two major London clinics, it is extremely rare to treat patients with similar cases. However, this person suffered from other chronic illnesses and his immune system was severely weakened.
The patient was first infected with COVID-19 in early 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. He presented with all the symptoms and the infection was confirmed by a PCR test. Over the next 72 weeks, the patient was hospitalized several times for both routine check-ups and treatment. Throughout this time, his Covid-19 tests were consistently positive – he had about 50 of them in total. According to the doctors, this was a single prolonged illness, not a recurring infection. These conclusions were reached after a thorough review of the tests.
“The throat swab tests were positive every time,” said BBC London doctor Luke Bladgen Snell, who will soon present the results of his work at a medical conference in Europe. “The patient has never had a negative test. And we can conclude that it was the same infection because of its genetic characteristics. The information we obtained from sequencing the viral genome was unique and consistent for this patient.
It is noteworthy that the deceased patient was unable to clear the infection even with the help of antiviral drugs. According to experts, it is extremely important to study such a course of the disease, as it can lead to the emergence of new variants of COVID-19 (although this did not happen in this case). “If people remain infected for a long time, the virus continues to adapt to them. As a result, the coronavirus may have the opportunity to develop new mutations,” Snell explains. “Some of our patients had the same mutations that were observed in the variants of concern.”
At the same time, the doctor explains that they have studied a total of nine cases of “long COVID” and none of them has led to the emergence of new dangerous variants of the disease. According to Snell, people with chronic COVID may not even be carriers of the disease. The case of a person who suffered for 505 days is different from what is usually called “long COVID” – when there is no virus left in the body (and test results are negative), but some symptoms such as loss of smell or “brain fog” persist for a long time.
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