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Patients have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material after apparently recovering from infection with the virus and being discharged from the hospital, according to media reports and a study published in JAMA last month. The phenomenon has sparked concerns that people could continue to infect others long after their illness had passed. But a preprint posted to medRxiv yesterday (March 9) suggests that patients with mild symptoms shed viable viral particles for 10 days or less after the onset of illness.
“This is a very important contribution to understanding both the natural history of Covid-19 clinical disease as well as the public health implications of viral shedding,” says Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy, in remarks to STAT. Osterholm was not involved in the study.
The work was conducted on nine patients in Germany. The authors ...
