Rome, 22 April 2022 – Sick of Covid for 505 days before dying. And the record case is not isolated, reinforcing the idea that the new ones variants of the coronavirus are formed in these patients, affected by Long Covid and who fail to heal. The longest Sars-Cov-2 infection ever recorded was shown at the congress of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Lisbon. Experts King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust studied the case of an immunosuppressed patient who, exhausted by the virus, was unable to recover from the infection despite treatment.
It is obviously not a single clinical history that pushes researchers – led by Luke Blagdon Snell – to hypothesize a link between Long Covid and variants. The study presented in Portugal has in fact followed as many as 9 patients who have been burdened by the virus for a very long time. They were all immunosuppressed due to illnesses (HIV, tumors, etc) or ongoing therapies (with immunosuppressants).
The same study also documented the first case of occult infection: one patient, who tested negative for the swab, after some time returned positive for Covid. In-depth analyzes showed that the infection in question originated from a variant that is no longer circulating. A sign that the coronavirus had never left the body, it had simply ‘hidden’ and was no longer tracked by the tests. By periodically analyzing and sequencing the infection in the nine patients on which the study was focused, it emerged that over time variants already known as alpha, delta and omicron appeared. And therefore it did not come from any external contagion, the virus as days, weeks and months passed, changed in the patient’s body.
Of the nine patients who participated in the research, five survived. Two of them had received monoclonal and antiviral antibodies. The ninth patient who has contracted Covid for more than a year remains positive, 412 days to be exact. Despite antibody therapy, he still can’t recover.