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Coronavirus patients may be contagious for weeks longer than first thought, study says
Some people who get the coronavirus could be contagious for a lot longer than the two-week quarantine period that many countries are using, a new study says.
Researchers looking at cases in China say patients could spread the virus for up to 37 days after they start showing symptoms, according to the study published in the British medical journal The Lancet.
On average, survivors still had the virus in their respiratory system for about 20 days and could presumably continue to spread the disease, researchers found.
“The shortest observed duration of viral shedding among survivors was 8 days, whereas the longest was 37 days,” the researchers said.
There have been 127,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world since the virus first emerged, according to Johns Hopkins University, and more than 4,700 people have died.
The vast majority of cases have been in China’s central Hubei province, where doctors study patients for this new research. The researchers looked at all adult patients who were admitted to two hospitals in Wuhan, China, and were either discharged or died by January 31.
A separate study in the New England Journal of Medicine said that coronavirus patients could be infected for up to 24 days before showing symptoms. The average time was much shorter, about three days, the study found.
People are most likely to spread the virus when they are the sickest, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Some spread might be possible before people show symptoms; there have been reports of this occurring with this new coronavirus, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads,” the CDC said.
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