Longest Covid-19 infection ‘lasted nearly two years’

Researchers in the Netherlands have reported an extremely long Covid-19 infection in a man who died last year – and warn of the emergence of more dangerous variants of the coronavirus.

The elderly man, who was immunocompromised because of previous illnesses, was admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam in February 2022 with a Covid-19 infection.

He was continuously positive for the coronavirus until his death in October last year for a total of 613 days.

Other cases of very long infections in people whose immune systems were unable to adequately fight the virus were previously reported.

The researchers led by Magda Vergouwe from the University of Amsterdam plan to present the report at a congress of the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Barcelona on April 27 to 30.

The case is also interesting for researchers because the coronavirus can change particularly strongly in such long-term infected people. This harbours the risk of variants of the virus emerging that can more easily overcome the immune systems of healthy people.

The researchers in the Netherlands repeatedly took samples from the man to analyse the genetic material of the coronavirus. They found more than 50 mutations compared to the Omicron variant BA.1 that was circulating at the time, including those that would allow the virus to evade the immune defence.

Just 21 days after the man had received a certain anticoronavirus drug, the virus also developed signs of resistance to it.

The man eventually died from a flare-up of one of his previous illnesses. He is not known to have infected anyone with his mutated version of the coronavirus.