A 59-year-old man who had been infected with COVID-19 for 411 days has been cured by British researchers. To figure out how to treat the virus variant, the team examined its genetic code.
The man is thought to have had the virus in his body longer than anyone else in the world and still lived.
The patient’s immune system was already compromised following a kidney transplant in December 2020, when he initially tested positive for COVID-19.
He continued to test positive for the virus despite the symptoms lessening until January 2022.
A group of researchers from Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London described how the man recovered from his infection after more than 13 months in the study that was published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Unlike protracted COVID or repeated episodes of the illness, persistent COVID infection can happen in a small percentage of patients with compromised immune systems.
According to Dr. Luke Blagdon Snell, an infectious diseases specialist at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, these patients can continue to test positive for the infection for months or even years.
HOW WAS HE CURED?
The unnamed man had an early B.1 variant of the original Wuhan strain, according to medical experts at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospitals who used genetic analysis to make this determination. Since then, the Alpha, Delta, and Omicron variants have supplanted this strain.
When they discovered the variant, the scientists gave him the same drug regimen that assisted Donald Trump in battling the illness: a combination of casirivimab and imdevimab monoclonal antibodies from Regeneron.
This therapy is no longer used because, like the majority of other antibody treatments, it is ineffective against more recent virus variants like Omicron.
The group claimed they were unaware of any other recorded instance of a patient being healed after such a protracted infection.
