Symptoms of Covid-19 Cured, Patients Still Potential to Spread Corona Virus
Even though the Covid-19 symptoms have disappeared after eight days, some patients still have the potential to transmit the corona virus.
Researchers in China found that half of the patients they treated for mild Covid-19 infection still had corona virus up to eight days after symptoms.
The results of this new study have been published online in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Lixin Xie MD, Lokesh Sharma and several co-authors report a study of 16 Covid-19 patients treated at the General Hospital Treatment Center of PLA in Beijing.
The treated patients were infected between 28 January and 9 February 2020, with an average patient age of 35 years.
Launching Science Daily, Monday (3/30/2020), the researchers collected samples of throat swabs for Covid-19 patients for analysis.
Patients recovering from Covid-19 were then discharged after recovery and confirmed corona virus negative, at least after having performed two PCR tests.
"The most significant finding from our study is that half of these patients continue to release the virus even after their symptoms have healed," Dr. Sharma, Section of Pulmonary medical instructor, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine, Department of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine.
Dr. Sharma said a severe infection might require longer release of the virus.
The main symptoms in Covid-19 patients include fever, cough, pain in the pharynx or throat and difficulty breathing. Furthermore, the symptoms in these patients are then treated with various drugs.
The time from infection to onset of symptoms, which is the incubation period, is five days, among all patients, except for one patient with more duration.
The average duration of Covid-19 symptoms is eight days, while the length of time a patient can transmit the disease after symptoms have ended is about one to eight days.
Two of these patients had one diabetes and one had tuberculosis (TB), but this condition did not affect the time of Covid-19 infection.
Lixin Xie, who is a professor at the College of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing suggested that patients who have mild respiratory symptoms from Covid-19, better stay at home so as not to infect others.
"Extend your quarantine for two weeks after recovery to ensure that you do not infect others," advises Dr. Xie.
In addition, the researchers also advised the medical community to be more careful in patients with Covid-19 who had recovered symptomatically.
"Covid-19 patients can be contagious, even after symptomatic recovery, so treat patients who are asymptomatic or who are recovering as carefully as in symptomatic patients (with symptoms)," explained the researcher.
The researchers emphasized that all these patients had milder infections and recovered from the disease.
Also read: Genome Analysis Prove Covid-19 Combined from Two Viruses
Although this study took a sample of a small proportion of Covid-19 patients, they have not been able to ascertain whether it will apply equally to more vulnerable patients.
Among Covid-19 patients who are at risk, such as the elderly, whose immune system is low, as well as patients who are undergoing immunosuppressive therapy.
"Further research is still needed to investigate whether the virus detected by real-time PCR is capable of transmitting in the later stages of Covid-19 infection," Dr. Xie
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