UK patient cured after 411 days of covid

A study has been published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, the authors of which, a group of British doctors, talk about a successful case of curing a covid patient who had been ill for more than 13 months, reports medicalXpress.

So-called persistent COVID is distinct from both post-COVID and recurrent infections, and occurs in a small number of patients with an already weakened immune system. They can test positive for covid for months, while the infection constantly spreads, leading to pneumonia and other dangerous conditions.

The 59-year-old man described in the study had a weakened immune system due to a kidney transplant. He became infected in December 2020 and continued to test positive until January 2022. To find out if it was different strains or a single persistent infection, the researchers did a genetic analysis using nanopore sequencing technology. The test showed that the patient had the B.1 strain that dominated the world at the end of 2020. He was prescribed a combination of the monoclonal antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab and was successfully treated. Now antibody treatment is almost never used, since it is ineffective against Omicron and other new strains - they are resistant to all available antibodies.

Doctors call the longest case of persistent infection a patient who tested positive for 505 days. It was not possible to save him, since it was at the beginning of the pandemic. There are now many more treatment options available to physicians.