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May 5, 2020 05:30 am

Experts Are Puzzled Over Why the Coronavirus Lingers in Some Asymptomatic Patients For as Long as 40 Days

Shashank Bengali, reporting for Los Angeles Times: By his second day in the hospital with COVID-19, Charles Pignal's mild cough and 102-degree fever had disappeared. Bored and "bouncing off the walls" of his room in the isolation ward at Singapore's National Center for Infectious Diseases, he felt like he could go out and play a set of tennis. The 42-year-old footwear executive told his mother on the phone, "I'll be out of here in a couple of days." But Pignal would test positive for the coronavirus for five more weeks, despite developing no further symptoms. He wasn't released until the 40th day after he first fell ill, when he finally tested negative two days in a row. Cases like his are coming under increasing scrutiny as medical researchers worldwide puzzle over why the coronavirus -- which typically lasts about two to three weeks in the body -- appears to endure longer in some patients, even relatively young, healthy ones. With studies showing that asymptomatic patients can transmit the SARS-CoV-2 virus, understanding how the virus leaves the body is among the most urgent mysteries facing researchers as governments in the United States and across the world begin to reopen their economies. Although studies show that the average recovery time from COVID-19 is two weeks, and nearly all patients are virus-free within a month, "less than 1% to 2%, for reasons that we do not know, continue to shed virus after that," said Hsu Li Yang, a physician specializing in infectious diseases at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore. In recent weeks, China and South Korea have reported that some patients who had recovered from COVID-19 tested positive again in follow-up visits. In extreme cases, patients in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began late last year, reportedly tested positive 70 days after recovery. Doctors in both countries said they didn't believe the patients had been reinfected, a worrisome possibility because of its implications for building widespread immunity to a disease for which there is no vaccine. They also had no evidence that the patients had infected others.

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