Covid Patients Infectious For 9 Days: Study

The Lancet Microbe study also suggests that people infected with SARS-CoV-2 are mostly likely to be highly infectious from symptom onset and the following five days

- Durgesh Nandan Jha

New Delhi: Covid-19 patients can shed fragments of the virus that causes the infection for up to 83 days in their respiratory or stool samples but they are unlikely to be infectious for as long.

According to a study published in The Lancet Microbe, one of the world’s top medical journals, no live virus has been isolated from a culture of the respiratory or stool sample beyond day nine of symptoms despite persistently high viral RNA loads.

This means that a person affected by Covid-19 is infectious for nine days after developing disease symptoms though tests may find presence of the virus for nearly three months.

The study conducted by researchers from UK and Italy involved systemic review and meta-analysis of 79 studies that focused on SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19.