On March 3-6, 2024, Denver held the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI). Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, unveiled to attendees the remarkable finding that the COVID-19 virus survives in patients after the acute phase of the disease ends and persists over time.
This discovery has not only aroused great attention in the medical community, but also regained new hope for the recovery and rehabilitation of physical and mental health. Medical technology is making new breakthroughs every day. The results of this study have also brought people gains compared to other infectious diseases, and brought unprecedented information and front-line scientific evidence for people to devote themselves to the fight against the fourth epidemic of the virus.
Not so long ago, before mass vaccination, many people may be at risk of contracting the virus in their daily lives, especially those at high risk who need long-term clinical care. Now this discovery is a major breakthrough in medical science.
So, can the new scientific findings really help us understand the risk, recovery, and future strategies to combat COVID-19? Let's take a closer look.
1. How long the virus survives.
Since the lockdown of Wuhan in March last year, millions of people have died worldwide due to COVID-19. The global medical research community has joined forces to devote significant resources to the treatment of diseases and the study of viruses.
In fact, the survival time of the COVID-19 virus has been debated in the scientific community before. Although the virus is still present in the body, it is not clear whether the persistence of the virus means that the patient will remain infectious.
This has led to a disagreement among some medical scientists about the remnants of the COVID-19 virus. Some medical scientists believe that although the virus is present in the body, its infectivity has been eliminated, so it will not have much impact on the health of patients and the general public.
But other medical scientists believe that as long as the virus is still in the body, it means that people may be reinfected, or that the virus will have an effect through the rest of the signs. This is commonly referred to as a long-term infection or long-term recovery.
In the midst of this worldwide war against the virus, we have seen a series of medical leaders come up with their ideas and a variety of evidence about it, leading to controversy about long-term infection.
This includes hypotheses about long-term infections earlier in 2021. Some reports claim that effective testing has been carried out in all cases from the very beginning of the earliest COVID-19 leaks.
Some researchers strongly refute the assumptions based on the test methods and samples, believing that such assumptions are unscientific, and then actively engage in laboratory work to support their own opinions.
While the latter argument has been questioned, it has encouraged other scientists to conduct further experiments to determine whether the COVID-19 virus can persist in the body, and for how long.
In the Australian study, scientists found that some weak indicators of COVID-19 RNA could still be detected in the samples of some subjects, even after a month of recovery.
This suggests that even if a patient recovers from the disease and has a negative test result, there are still traces of the COVID-19 virus in some areas of their body.
This phenomenon is an important breakthrough for medical researchers. They began to wonder how long the virus would persist in the patient's body and what effect their presence would have on the body's immune system and other organs.
In search of answers, scientists have invested a lot of scientific research and started looking at a variety of different types of cases, and are happy to accept any relevant data to support them. This research, as well as the active discussion among the scientific community, has greatly contributed to advances in this field, providing new hope for moving away from COVID-19.
Eventually, after a long period of medical researchers and scientists, they found that the COVID-19 virus can survive in the body for more than a year, or even longer.
This is the first time this phenomenon has been detected in the world. With this discovery, scientists are confident that they will gradually understand the long-term effects of the COVID-19 virus on our bodies.
Through this experiment, people have strengthened their confidence in vaccination and antiviral work, because they believe that if we stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we and our future generations will have more chances to regain their future.
2. Future research work of scientists.
While this finding is important for scientists and doctors, it's uncertain what the long-term effects these viruses will have on human health with COVID-19.
That's why this finding can help researchers better understand the course and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it doesn't make people afraid or biased about the virus.
The following scientific research work is also particularly important. In order to better understand the long-term effects of the virus on the human body, and to more effectively treat patients with long-term infections or cures, further experiments and observations are needed.
Some medical researchers plan to follow the immune pathways of patients who have recovered for a long time to determine exactly what changes have occurred in their immune pathways.
There are also medical researchers who are ready to try different treatments to more effectively remove the virus from the body, reduce the discomfort of patients, and stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus in society.
This work includes developing new antiviral drugs, testing various effective antiviral therapies, and studying in detail how the human immune system responds to the COVID-19 virus, providing scientists with more important information about the war against the disease.
Medical researchers are also planning a clinical trial called "HEROIC", which will evaluate whether a drug called a "monoclonal antibody" can reduce the symptoms of COVID-19 in patients and block the spread of the virus in the body.
This work will provide medical scientists with more important information about antiviral drugs and is expected to improve patient outcomes and help us fight the COVID-19 pandemic more effectively.
No matter how important this finding is to the medical science community, the end result needs to be applied to clinical practice to help patients recover better and alleviate anxiety in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At this critical moment in the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic, we should support the unremitting efforts of scientific researchers, pay attention to their latest research progress, and actively cooperate with epidemic prevention and control work in daily life, so as to contribute to the health and development of our society.
The author believes that the results of this work have had a huge impact on the origin, end, and final solution of the COVID-19 epidemic worldwide.
The findings provide important information for diagnosing and treating COVID-19 patients and preventing the spread of the virus, as well as providing researchers with more important data on the fight against the virus.
This means that researchers will continue to work on more experiments and apply these scientific findings to clinical practice to help patients recover better and withstand the pandemic.
In the future, we believe that researchers will make more major breakthroughs, bringing new hope and opportunities to the global anti-epidemic work. I wish the COVID-19 virus to leave this beautiful world as soon as possible, and that humanity can overcome this sudden epidemic and return to normal life.