Coronavirus: After 11 days, patients stop being infectious — Study
Nigerian coronavirus patients on admission at the various isolation centres across the country may now go home even before they tested negative to the virus. This is because a new study by researchers from Singapore have found that coronavirus patients cannot infect others after 11 days of being ill, even if their test still comes back positive.
The scientists also found that an infected person becomes contagious around two days before symptoms show. They said the patients then remain contagious for between seven and 10 days after they start showing signs of the disease— which include having a high temperature and a new and continuous cough.
The scientists further noted that COVID-19 ‘could not be isolated or cultured after day 11 of the illness. The scientists from Singapore’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases and the Academy of Medicine examined 73 patients with coronavirus.
They looked at whether the bug could be passed from them to someone else, the New York Post reported. Positive tests in patients that still had symptoms after two weeks could be picking up sections of the bug that cannot pass the virus on to someone else. The authors of the study said: “Based on the accumulated data since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the infectious period of coronavirus in symptomatic individuals may begin around two days before the onset of symptoms, and persists for about seven to 10 days after the onset of symptoms.”
They added that active viral replication drops quickly after the first week, and the viable virus was not found after the second week of illness. It comes as the UK reported a further 118 coronavirus deaths, a 30 percent drop since last Sunday’s 170, taking the total to 36,793. The daily death figure, revealed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the daily press briefing on Monday, is the lowest since the lockdown was put into force on March 23. Scientists hope that their research on the disease’s ability to spread could help hospitals figure out when to send admitted patients home. Vanguard
