A Man Drowned. Six Weeks Later, He Was Still Testing Positive For COVID
iflscience.com | Feb. 17, 2022 | Katy Spalding

Last September, in the Italian seaside province of Chieti, a 41-year-old Ukrainian man and his friend went for a dip in the sea. Sixteen hours later, he was dead from drowning. A sad tale, but no medical mystery. Except for the fact that, for nearly six full weeks after his death, his body tested positive no fewer than 28 times for COVID-19 – a discovery that the researchers involved say is of “fundamental importance for pathologists.”

Would be interesting to see how those 28 positive tests were recorded in the weekly case reports.

Even weirder is the fact that, before death, the man had been “completely asymptomatic,” the team wrote in a study now published in the BMC Journal of Medical Case Reports, and is likely to have had a pretty low viral load when he died.

This “reflect the importance of postmortem swabs in all autopsy cases, and not only in potential [COVID-19]-related death,” the report notes – and shows that pathologists should test for the presence of COVID “a long time after the moment of death, even if a low initial viral load was assessed.”

. . . .

And not only were the COVID viral particles detectable for nearly six weeks after death, but by the end of the testing period they were the only detectable particles. See, when researchers test for COVID, they can also run a control test at the same time to verify that test results really are coming from the samples they want. They do this by testing for human cellular RNA which get swept up with the viral particles when a swab is taken – if no human RNA is found, then it probably didn’t come out of a human nose.

But by the time 41 days had passed, these tests weren’t picking up human RNA anymore. The COVID tests were still coming up positive, but the human cells had become undetectable.

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