Researchers in China have claimed that they have discovered a newly mutated sub-type of COVID-19.
They report a middle-aged man with the COVID-19 virus was infectious for a scary 49 days. This sets a record of how long someone has been reported to carry the virus.
To add to it, his symptoms were mild however researchers say he formed a dynamic balance with the virus.
According to The Daily Mail:
The 'chronic' case indicates a strain which can spread among people for weeks, even if the host doesn't show many symptoms.
It appears harder to shake off, too. The man needed to be injected with the blood of a COVID-19 survivor in order to recover.
The study was published on March 27 on medRxiv, a preprint site for scientific medical papers. It means it hasn't been scrutinised by other scientists yet.
The Chinese man, who has not been named, visited a hospital in Wuhan to have SARS-CoV-2 tests on February 8, 2020.
He stated that he had suffered an intermittent fever for around one week, but had no other common symptoms, such as a cough.
COVID-19 testing collected with swabs to the throat tested positive on days 17, 22, 26, 30, 34, 39, 43 and 49. It came back as negative on day 47, which may have been a fluke.
This suggests that the patient was 'shedding' the virus for 49 days, a scientific term describing how a person excretes the disease in their breathe or through sneeze and cough droplets.
Previous research shows that viral shedding lasts 20 days on average, with the longest case reported at 37 days.
The longer the duration of shedding, the more severe the outcomes tend to be, Dr Li Tan and colleagues said.
'Interestingly, contrary to the conclusions above, we here reported one of the non-severe cases has the longest duration of viral shedding,' the team said.
With all that said, I have a strong suspension we will have a second wave next year much like how the Flu occurs yearly.
However, by then we will have vaccines and know more about the virus to kick it in the butt before it spreads and kills so quickly as it has.
