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Biotech / Medical : Coronavirus / COVID-19 Pandemic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (3864)	6/5/2020 10:36:01 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 22882

How long does the coronavirus last inside the body? Researchers are narrowing down how long the virus persists inside the body and whether people can be quickly re-infected. 5 Minute Read By Lois Parshley PUBLISHED June 3, 2020 Friday, March 13, was an unlucky day for Fiona Lowenstein. Over the weekend, the 26-year-old spiked a fever, then she started coughing, and soon she was so short of breath she had trouble speaking. At the hospital, Lowenstein tested positive for COVID-19. She was admitted and put on supplemental oxygen. After two days, she improved enough to go home—but her symptoms didn’t stop there. She started to have intense diarrhea, lost her sense of smell, and was plagued by a sore throat and hives. Most troubling, about a month after her initial symptoms, she developed intense fatigue and severe headaches. Lowenstein started scrambling her words and struggled to focus, forgetting what she meant to say in the middle of speaking. “It felt like I’d just been hit by a truck,” she says. “I had days where I would manage to do work, and then the next day I’d not feel like getting out of bed.” Scientists are still trying to understand why some COVID-19 patients like Lowenstein are having these kinds of relapses—sometimes weeks or months after they first got sick. It’s possible that long-term patients are struggling because some of the coronavirus sticks around in their tissues. Researchers are now figuring out how long the germ stays alive inside the body, a situation known as viral persistence. That may be different from the length of time that someone who had COVID-19 can shed viral fragments, which can sometimes cause false positives on diagnostic tests. It’s important to understand COVID-19 persistence, as this knowledge determines how long someone is contagious, how long patients should stay in isolation, and even whether it’s possible to be re-infected. “Persistence is a tricky word,” says Mary Kearney, a senior scientist who studies HIV drug resistance at the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research. It’s especially tricky, she says, because scientists don’t know how coronavirus persistence might vary by individual or even by organ. The coronavirus has a genome made of RNA rather than DNA, Kearney says. In other families of RNA viruses, such as Hepatitis C, persistent infections can lead to liver disease or cancer, even decades after the original infection. “Where there’s long-term persistence, there can be long-term consequences,” she says. So although these outcomes are not yet evident for COVID-19 given its novelty, they should be investigated. Persistence versus reinfection Scientists use three general categories to define persistence. With acute viral infections—such as the stomach-churning norovirus—people develop symptoms quickly and then fully recover within days. Other tiny invaders stick around—among them, the varicella-zoster virus which initially causes chickenpox but then becomes latent in neurons for the rest of a patient’s life. Others still, such as poliovirus, are acute in most people but persistent in a few who have trouble clearing the virus from their bodies. continues at nationalgeographic.com