Multiple COVID-19 variants may be able to infect a person at the same time: study – CTV
March 2, 2022
When a person falls ill with COVID-19, they may not just have one variant attacking them, according to a pair of new studies that suggest less dominant variants may be simultaneously present and hiding in the same infected individual.
Researchers believe that several different variants of SARS-CoV-2 could be inside a person’s body at one time, with some variants cloaking themselves from the immune system.
“Our results showed that one can have several different virus variants in one’s body. Some of these variants may use kidney or spleen cells as their niche to hide, while the body is busy defending against the dominant virus type,” Kapil Gupta, lead author of one of the new studies, said in a press release Tuesday. “This could make it difficult for the infected patients to get rid of SARS-CoV-2 entirely.”
