Coronavirus Pandemic: Can Covid-19 infection spread after symptom ends?

New Delhi : Some of the coronavirus patients can be the potential transmitter of the Covid-19 infection even after the symptoms of the disease disappear, found a new study. It has been suggested that the people who have cured of the disease must also remain in the quarantine for some time.

The findings from the study become more crucial for India as many reports of quarantine breakers have emerged in the past couple of days. The experts believe that the Indian government does not have the right data about coronavirus carriers due to low testing rate.

For the study, researchers examined patients at the Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing between January 28 and February 9. The median age of examined patients is 35.5 and had mild coronavirus infection.

The findings from the study have been published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine on Friday.

As mentioned in the study, the researchers took throat swab samples from the patients discharged after their recovery and confirmation of negative viral status by two consecutive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.

"The most significant finding from our study is that half of the patients kept shedding the virus even after resolution of their symptoms," said Dr Lokesh Sharma, department of medicine, Yale School of Medicine. "More severe infections may have even longer shedding times."

All of these patients had primary symptoms like fever, cough, pain in the pharynx and difficult or laboured breathing.

"If you had mild respiratory symptoms from Covid-19 and were staying at home so as not to infect people, extend your quarantine for another two weeks after recovery to ensure that you don’t infect other people," said Lixin Xie, professor, College of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing.

The study, however, mentioned that the findings may vary for the patients of different age group.