A JAMA Internal Medicine research letter today finds that 18% of recovered COVID-19 patients test positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, but only 3% (1 of 32) carry replicating virus in their respiratory tract.Italian researchers studied 176 recovered COVID-19 patients admitted for post-acute follow-up treatment at Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A.
Gemelli IRCCS in Rome from Apr 21 to Jun 18. Patients had discontinued isolation according to current criteria—no fever for 3 consecutive days, improvement in symptoms, and two negative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test results for the virus, 24 hours apart.Nasal/oropharyngeal (NOS) swab samples from the patients were analyzed for total