Prolonged SARS-CoV-2 Infection in a CAR T-Cell Therapy Recipient

In a recent case report, a team of physicians described an immunosuppressed patient with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who was contagious for more than 2 months. Infectious virus was present in the patient ’s endotracheal aspirate (ETA) 72 days after his COVID-19 diagnosis and 2 days before he died from the massive lung infection. The findings from the 73-year-old man, who had recently undergone chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy, suggest that patients with COVID-19 who are severely im munosuppressed may need isolation for longer than the currently recommended 20 days.
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research