Corona’s longest infection in the world: it has been going on for 500 days!

Doctors in Britain called for urgent new treatments to confront a "long-term" corona infection, after identifying the first person in the world to have the virus settled in his body for more than a year.

The man, who had a weak immune system, contracted the virus in 2020, and the results of his "PCR" tests remained positive for 505 days.

Before this patient, the longest infection with the Corona virus was an American cancer survivor, in her forties, and her test result was positive for 335 days.

And researchers at King's College London, the British National Health Service, and the Guys Foundation, followed 9 patients with long-term "Covid", to find out how the virus developed during the course of infection.

According to "Sky News Arabia", all patients had a weak immune system, due to organ transplantation, AIDS or cancer, or due to treatments for other diseases.

The infection usually lasted for about 10 weeks, but two patients had contracted the virus for more than a year, in addition to the patient who had been infected for 505 days.

Another patient's tests are also still positive for 412 days, and may exceed the record of 505 days at his next follow-up appointment, according to the British newspaper, "The Guardian".

And last summer, doctors in Bristol, Britain, revealed that the 72-year-old patient, Dave Smith, had tested positive for the virus for about 10 months.

It is noteworthy that patients with weakened immune systems are particularly vulnerable to long-term Covid infection, which may also occur due to new mutations of the virus.

In this study, 4 of the nine patients died, and corona probably contributed to a third to half of those deaths.

Genetic analyzes revealed that in 5 of the 9 patients, the virus acquired at least one mutation present in the mutants of concern to the virus. Alpha, Gamma, and Omicron.

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