Coronavirus may lurk deep in lungs after patients recover, study suggests
- Postmortem of woman finds she had undetected traces in lungs after testing negative three times and being discharged from hospital
- As WHO investigates why some recovered patients test positive again, the medical community works to assess any lasting effect on the body
The discovery, published in a paper in peer-reviewed journal Cell Research on Tuesday, could explain why a growing number of recovered patients had tested positive again.
“Our work provided the first pathological evidence for residual virus in the lung for a patient [who tested negative] three consecutive times,” wrote the researchers, led by Dr Bian Xiuwu of the Army Medical University in Chongqing, southwest China.
There was a need for the “improvement of clinical guidelines for virus containment and disease management”, they said.
The study was based on the postmortem examination of a 78-year-old woman who died after having had the coronavirus. She was admitted to Three Gorges Central Hospital in Chongqing on January 27 after a fall. She then also tested positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and subsequently developed its symptoms.