In a shocking revelation, a British man, 72 years, have tested positive for coronavirus for 10 months, the longest recorded case of continuous infection.
The Covid patient, Dave Smith, is a retired driving instructor from Bristol in western England, tested positive 43 times of which Smith was hospitalized seven times.
"I'd resigned myself, I'd called the family in, made my peace with everybody, said goodbye," he told BBC television.
Smith had a history of lung disease and had recently recovered from leukaemia when he caught the virus in March 2020.
An Agence France-Presse report stated, a consultant in infectious diseases at the University of Bristol and North Bristol NHS Trust, Ed Moran, said Smith "had active virus in his body" throughout.
"We were able to prove that by sending a sample of his virus to university partners who managed to grow it, proving that it was not just left-over products that were triggering a PCR test but actually active, viable virus," Moran said.
Smith recovered after treatment with a cocktail of synthetic antibodies developed by the US biotech firm Regeneron.
"This was allowed on compassionate grounds in his case but the treatment regime is not clinically approved for use in Britain," the report stated.
Smith finally tested negative, 45 days after receiving the Regeneron drug and some 305 days after his first infection.
Smith's treatment was not part of an official medical trial but his case is now being studied by virologist Andrew Davidson at the University of Bristol.
A paper on his case will be presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases in July, saying that he is thought to be "the longest infection recorded in the literature".
