Yale University researchers identified the patient, who is in their sixties and suffering from a kind of cancer, by tracing cases of a previously thought extinct variety to them.
An unidentified citizen of Connecticut has been infected with COVID-19 for more than a year, and scientists have discovered that the virus has mutated many times within them.
Further examination revealed that the individual’s bloodstream contained three distinct sub-lineages of the virus, indicating that they were a vector for mutation.
This is the longest Covid infection yet detected by health authorities, and it adds to the growing body of evidence that the virus mutates in vulnerable persons before spreading to others.
The case report is now accessible as a pre-print on MedRxiv, and its publication is pending peer review.
Yale’s home state of Connecticut, where Covid variant surveillance was conducted, revealed the presence of a B.1.517 strain that had not been found in the rest of the world for most of the previous year.
All infections were traced back to a single patient residing in an undisclosed region of the state.
They were suffering from “chronic Covid” and had tested positive for the virus for at least 471 days, according to further examination. As of Saturday’s publication, the patient continued to test positive for the virus.
In addition, they discovered that the virus was rapidly evolving within their bodies, which is not common for an illness.
It was mutating twice as quickly, resulting in the formation of three wholly unique genotypes of the virus.
Researchers noted, “This prolonged infection led to rapid SARS-CoV-2 evolution and divergence, a mechanism that may have contributed to the formation of genetically varied SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron, Delta, and Alpha.”
This is one of the first and longest cases of ‘chronic Covid’ found.
Experts have long been aware of the phenomenon known as “long Covid,” which occurs when a person continues to experience symptoms of the virus after the infection has subsided.
It also adds to the growing body of evidence indicating that the virus exploits immunocompromised individuals to mutate.
Last year, doctors in the United Kingdom discovered that a man with cancer had a virus that quickly mutated within his body. He eventually died of his disease.
This discovery provided support for the hypothesis that the virus was able to generate “escape mutations” that allowed it to dodge antibodies and persist in genetic code.
Since then, there have been more scattered accounts of persons with serious comorbidities, such as cancer, undergoing rapid viral mutations.
It is impossible to determine how many people contain a virus that regularly mutates, and there is little that scientists can do to prevent Covid from frequently evolving once it has found a suitable host.
Each time a drastically new version of Covid arises, the globe is caught off guard and officials scramble to combat the new menace.
When the Delta version, which originated in India, spread over the world in the spring and summer of 2021, it created one of the virus’s most lethal outbreaks to date.
At the end of the previous year, the Omicron variety swept over the globe, causing record case rates in virtually every country it touched and eroding much of the United States’ immunity.
