A patient who tested positive for Covid-19 for 411 days was finally cured by a combination of antibodies, British researchers announced on Friday, who had to genetically analyze their virus to find the right answer. A persistent infection, unlike prolonged Covid or repeated episodes of the disease, can affect a small number of patients with already weakened immune systems.
They can test positive for months or even years, with the infection “rumbling all the time”, explained Luke Blagdon Snell, an infectious disease specialist at the Guy and St Thomas Foundation of Britain’s public health service, the NHS.
In about half, symptoms persist, such as lung inflammation, he told AFP, adding that many unknowns about Covid remained.
Tested positive for Covid-19 for 411 days
In a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, a team of researchers led by Luke Blagdon Snell describe how a 59-year-old man finally got over his infection after more than 13 months. This patient, with a weakened immune system from a kidney transplant, contracted Covid in December 2020 and tested positive continuously until January 2022.
To find out if it had been contaminated multiple times or if it had a persistent infection, the researchers used rapid genetic analysis (nanopore sequencing). The results proved infection.
So the researchers administered a combination of monoclonal antibodies, casirivimab and imdevimab, which appeared to work. But this success is linked to the fact that the patient was infected with an old version of the coronavirus. This variant, dominant in late 2020, has since been superseded by other incarnations.
However, “the new variants (…) are resistant to all the antibodies available in the United Kingdom, in the EU and even in the United States,” says Luke Blagdon Snell.
The longest known infection lasted 505 days.
Witness another case, which caused more difficulty for the team of scientists and is detailed in a second study, not yet peer-reviewed: Researchers unsuccessfully tested existing antibody treatments on a 60-year-old man, seriously ill and infected. since April.
So the team mixed two previously uncombined antiviral treatments, Paxlovid and remdesivir, and administered them to the unconscious patient through a nasogastric tube. These treatments were given twice as long as is normally recommended.
The covid infection finally disappeared, the man was cured and gave hope of a new treatment option for persistent and severe covid patients.
In April, these same researchers announced, at the European Congress of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, the longest known persistent Covid-19 infection, in a man who tested positive for 505 days, until his death.
Source: BFM TV
