At this point, it’s no longer surprising to hear headlines about the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve seen how clearly its dangerous Delta variant spread across the world, and also how our dedicated scientists and health professionals are working around the clock to lift humanity off this unfortunate event.
Around 242 million people have already been infected with COVID-19 one way or another, whether you showed symptoms or you’re just asymptomatic and are/were none the wiser. Nevertheless, it’s important for us to isolate ourselves should we observe symptoms or obtain a positive test for the notorious coronavirus. Isolations in this case would usually last some 14 days, depending on local policies in place.
One particular 47-year-old American woman, however, had a particularly lengthy bout with COVID-19: she tested positive—consistently—for a total of 335 days. The standout finding was made available for preprint at MedRxiv.
She was hospitalized for COVID-19 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland, USA all the way back in the spring of 2020—and she was only released by April this year. Between the two dates, she had continuously tested positive for COVID-19, making her infection duration the longest-recorded one so far.
The woman constantly felt a shortness of breath, and kept coughing despite the initial two weeks having passed. She would eventually be returned home, but she still needed supplemental oxygen. According to a statement by NIH infectious disease specialist Veronique Nussenblatt: “Sometimes she felt better, sometimes she felt worse.”
Experts continuously tested her months later, and they kept coming back positive. They had initially thought that the tests were simply detecting viral “fragments,” which were roughly common with people infected with COVID-19 for extended periods of time.
However, her case would soon become a unique case study into just how long infections can stay in an individual, and how viruses can evolve inside an infected person’s body over time.
Of particular interest is that she was actually considered immunocompromised; she was actually diagnosed with lymphoma, and her treatment three years ago was primarily CAR T-cell therapy. The therapy left the woman with little to no B cells, which were immune cells that were responsible for producing antibodies and regulating immune systemic function.
A follow-up COVID-19 test on the woman just from March of 2021 showed her viral load actually increasing compared to levels from earlier tests, leading experts to ponder on whether she had been reinfected, or if she had remained infected this whole time. Nussenblatt followed: “I’ve never heard of a transplant patient with flu for a year; […] that’s a really long time.”
With the help of NIH molecular virologist Elodie Ghedin and NIH computational biologist Alllison Roder, the viruses obtained on the woman’s body were sequenced, then compared with the viruses obtained from her during her earlier tests from the previous year.
These follow-up tests seemed to confirm that the virus that infected her several months ago was virtually identical to the virus she had now. In fact, it was one of the earlier variants of SARS-CoV-2, which had since gone to the wayside in favor of much more virulent variants like the Delta variant. This means that the woman had consistently been infected with an older strain of COVID-19 for a total of 335 days.
The woman’s truly unique story ended on a particularly happy note, though. She had gone through a second bout of hospitalization and treatment due to the resurgence of the virus that seemingly never left, and several follow-up tests on her since April 2021 returned negative. To Nussenblatt, this confirmed that “the infection is gone,” ending the woman’s almost year-long bout with COVID-19.
In Nussenblatt’s last video call with her year-long patient, she was “walking on the beach,” with “no oxygen tube in sight.”
References
- Couzin-Frankel, J. (2021, October 19). A cancer survivor had the longest documented COVID-19 infection. Here’s what scientists learned. Science.Org. https://www.science.org/content/article/cancer-survivor-had-longest-documented-covid-19-infection-here-s-what-scientists-learned
- Guenot, M. (2021, October 20). A cancer survivor carried the coronavirus for almost a year in the world’s longest-ever active COVID-19 case. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/cancer-survivor-carried-coronavirus-335-days-longest-case-to-date-2021-10
- Guenot, M. & Business Insider. (2021, October 21). A cancer survivor had a record-breaking covid-19 infection for 335 days in total. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/cancer-survivor-sets-a-record-by-having-a-covid-infection-for-335-days
- Nussenblatt, V., Roder, A. E., Das, S., Wit, E. de, Youn, J.-H., Banakis, S., Mushegian, A., Mederos, C., Wang, W., Chung, M., Pérez-Pérez, L., Palmore, T., Brudno, J. N., Kochenderfer, J. N., & Ghedin, E. (2021). Year-long COVID-19 infection reveals within-host evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in a patient with B cell depletion (p. 2021.10.02.21264267). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.02.21264267v2
