COVID Alert: Coronavirus May Remain Active Even After Quarantine Period

Washington: There’s no guarantee that some COVID-infected people will not necessarily transmit the coronavirus even after they have completed the recommended quarantine period, according to a recent study.

The researchers, who monitored 38 Brazilian patients on a weekly basis over an eight-month period, found that it took a month on average for the diagnostic test to come negative.

The research — a partnership between France’s Pasteur Institute, University of Sao Paulo and Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil — followed the patients until they tested negative twice or thrice consecutively by RT-PCR.

“Of the 38 cases we tracked, two men and a woman were atypical in the sense that the virus was continuously detected in their organism for more than 70 days,” said Marielton dos Passos Cunha, lead author of the research, which was published in the Frontiers in Medicine journal.

“Based on this result, we can say that about 8 per cent of people infected by SARS-CoV-2 may be able to transmit the virus for more than two months, without necessarily manifesting any symptoms during the final stage of the infection,” Cunha said.

The researchers concluded that a period of 14 days was not long enough for the virus to stop being detectable.

“It can take a month for a patient to test negative, and in some cases included in our study the patients remained positive for 71 to 232 days,” informed Paola Minoprio, principal investigator for the study.

Several countries have shortened the quarantine period for those testing COVID-positive with mild symptoms, especially with Omicron being the dominant variant for the last two months. In India, for example, those getting infected are being advised home isolation for seven days.

This study, however, flags the risk of limiting quarantine to 7, 10 or even 14 days after testing positive.

It also re-emphasizes the importance of vaccination, social distancing and mask wearing, the researchers said.