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A 59-year-old man has been cured after being continuously sick with covid for 411 days.
The man, who has a weakened immune system after a kidney transplant, contracted covid in December 2020 and continued to test positive until January 2022.
In a new study published in the journal Clinical infectious diseases, a British research team describes how they were able to identify through analysis that the man had an early B.1 variant that was dominant at the end of 2020, and did not re-infect with new variants.
Thanks to the man having the early variant, he was able to get the active substances casirivimab/imdevimab approved, for some time in the EU and Great Britain, among others, and was cured.
It is likely that the treatment would not have been as successful if he had had one of the newer variants, such as omicron, as they are more resistant to this, and other antibody treatments.
This form of persistent covid where the patient never stops testing positive occurs among a small number of people with already weakened immune systems. It also differs from repeated infections or long-term covid, where the patient has symptoms but no longer tests positive for the virus.