Ghady Haidar, MD, was recently interviewed for a CBS 60 Minutes segment focusing on COVID-19 variants by medical correspondent, Dr Jon LaPook.
In this segment, Ghady discusses an immunocompromised patient with cancer who developed COVID-19 with persistence of SARS-CoV-2 replication for over 70 days, and with intra-host evolution of multiple mutated viral variants. These findings provided early evidence that certain groups of deeply immuno-compromised patients are at risk for prolonged infectious viral shedding.
“We had no idea at the time that people could still be actively infectious for that long,” Ghady shared. “We found out the virus really quickly began to develop all these deletions and mutations throughout the patient’s life.”
The full 60 Minutes segment can be viewed at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-variants-infectious-strains-60-minutes-2021-03-14/.