UK patient tested positive with Covid for record breaking 505 days

Covid patient who had a severely weakened immune system suffered from the virus for nearly a year and a half, scientists have confirmed.

The unnamed patient became infected in 2020 and tested positive for a total of 505 days before they tragically died.The heartbreaking death has sparked calls from doctors to seek urgent new treatments to help clear persistent Covid infections.

It comes as a world first, with this being the only case that shows a person to have been diagnosed with coronavirus for more than a year.

Prior, the most drawn-out PCR-confirmed case was a cancer survivor in her 40s who tested positive for 335 days in the US, reports The Guardian.Researchers at King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust documented nine patients with lasting Covid to explore how the virus had developed.Every infected person had suffered from weakened immune systems as a result of organ transplantation, cancer, HIV or therapies for another condition.They found that the infections persisted for around 10 weeks or so, except for two subjects who had Covid for over a year.It has been reported that the second person has so far tested positive for 412 days and could surpass the current record by their next appointment.Before that, medics in Bristol confirmed that 72-year-old patient Dave Smith, from Bristol, also had the same result for almost 10 months.It is believed persistent infections could also originate from the new Covid variants because the virus comes by fresh mutations as it progresses in the patient.Dr Luke Blagdon Snell, a clinical research fellow at Guy’s, explained: “These individuals seem to have a very poor outcome when they have persistent infection.“There’s an imperative to develop better.