EXPERTS BAFFLED WHY CONVALESCENT PATIENTS CAN’T SHAKE OFF CORONAVIRUS
Chinese physicians have successfully slowed the spread of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) across the country, they are now baffled at the growing number of recovered patients who continue to test positive without showing symptoms.
Those patients all tested negative for the virus at some point after recovering, but then tested positive again, some up to 70 days later, the doctors said. Many have done so over 50-60 days.
The prospect of people remaining positive for the virus— and therefore potentially infecapril tious—is of international concern, as China moved into a new phase of its containment battle.
So far, there have been no confirmations of newly positive patients infecting others, according to Chinese health officials.
In other countries
Disclosures by Chinese hospitals to Reuters, as well as in other media reports, indicate there are at least dozens of such cases.
In South Korea, about 1,000 people have been testing positive for four weeks or more. In Italy, the first European country ravaged by the pandemic, health officials noticed that coronavirus patients could test positive for the virus for about a month.
As there is limited knowledge available on how infectious these patients are, doctors in Wuhan are keeping them isolated for longer.
Zhang Dingyu, president of Jinyintan Hospital, where the most serious coronavirus cases were treated, said health officials recognized that the isolation might be excessive, especially if patients proved not to be infectious.
But, for now, it was better to do so to protect the public, he said.
He described the issue as one of the most pressing facing the hospital and said counselors were being brought in to help the emotional strain.
The plight of Wuhan’s longterm patients underlines how much remains unknown about COVID-19 and why it appears to affect different people in numerous ways, Chinese doctors said.
Yuan Yufeng, a vice president at Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan, told Reuters he was aware of a case in which the patient had positive retests after first being diagnosed with the virus about 70 days earlier.
“We did not see anything like this during SARS,” he said, referring to the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak that infected 8,098 people globally, mostly in China.
Patients in China are discharged after two negative nucleic acid tests, taken at least 24 hours apart, and if they no longer show symptoms. Some doctors want this requirement to be raised to three tests or more.
No treatment protocol
China’s National Health Commission directed Reuters to comments made at a briefing on Tuesday when asked for comment about how this category of patients was being handled.
Wang Guiqiang, director of the infectious disease department of Peking University First Hospital, said at the briefing that the majority of such paease tients were not showing symptoms and very few had seen their conditions worsen.
“The new coronavirus is a new type of virus,” said Guo Yanhong, a National Health Commission official. “For this disease, the unknowns are still greater than the knowns.”
Experts and doctors struggle with various theories to explain why the virus behaves so differently in people.
Zhao Yan, a doctor of emergency medicine at Wuhan’s Zhongnan Hospital, said he was skeptical about the possibility of reinfection based on cases at his facility, although he did not have hard evidence.