Cancer Patient Carries Coronavirus For 105 Days, Remains Asymptomatic

New York: US researchers have found an extraordinary case of a blood cancer patient who carried the coronavirus for 105 days, “and remained infectious for at least 70,” without experiencing any symptoms.

A study published in the journal Cell said that observing how long people can remain actively infected is significant to understand details about COVID-19 that are yet not known, PTI reported.

“At the time we started this study, we really didn’t know much about the duration of virus shedding,” senior author of the study Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US was quoted as saying.

“As this virus continues to spread, more people with a range of immunosuppressing disorders will become infected, and it’s important to understand how SARS-CoV-2 behaves in these populations,” he added.

The patient,  a 71-year-old woman from Kirkland, Washington, had been infected in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic setting in and had “numerous positive PCR tests for the virus over a period of weeks”, the study stated.

As per the researchers, the woman was “immunocompromised due to chronic blood cancer but never showed any symptoms of COVID-19”.

The scientists found that the infectious virus continued to be present for at least 70 days after the first positive test, and the woman didn’t fully shed the virus until after 105th day. “This was something that we expected might happen, but it had never been reported before,” Munster said.