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Researchers from Yale University found that a patient, who is diagnosed with lymphoma, has been testing positive for the virus for at least 471 days and that the virus rapidly mutated during their infection, according to the Daily Mail.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, can be found here.
Researchers reported that their surveillance system captured 30 nasal swabs from the unnamed individual, and sequenced COVID-19 genomes from day 79 through 471, which was between February of 2021 and March of 2022.
The researchers reported that they found "consistently recovered infectious virus and high viral loads" during the study.
"Our findings demonstrate that untreated chronic infections accelerate SARS-CoV-2 evolution, ultimately providing opportunity for the emergence of genetically divergent and potentially highly transmissible variants as seen with Delta and Omicron," the researchers reported.
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