The COVID-19 virus can persist in the blood and tissue of the infected patients for more than a year after the acute phase of the disease has ended, according to a study.
The research, presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) held from March 3 to 6 in Colorado, US, offers potential clues to why some people develop long COVID, a condition in which the symptoms linger for months.
The researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) found pieces of SARS-CoV-2, referred to as COVID antigens, lingering in the blood up to 14 months after infection and for over two years in tissue samples from people who had COVID-19.
“These two studies provide some of the strongest evidence so far that COVID antigens can persist in some people, even though we think they have normal immune responses,” said Michael Peluso, an infectious disease researcher at UCSF.