Testing negative for antibodies doesn’t mean 'you didn't have COVID-19,' survey of coronavirus long-haulers suggests

So-called coronavirus "long-haulers" — patients who suffer from COVID-19 symptoms for an extended period of time — are causing the medical community to re-evaluate the disease, Ed Yong reports for The Atlantic.

For instance, many studies have found that COVID-19 patients produce antibodies that appear to last months as a result of their infection, but The Atlantic notes that most of these studies focused either on hospitalized patients or those who had mild symptoms and swift recoveries. Long-haulers appear to be in a slightly different category, in which their bouts with the virus are defined more by its persistence, rather than severity. At least one survey led by David Putrino, a neuroscientist and rehabilitation specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, found that despite having symptoms consistent with COVID-19, nearly two-thirds of the 1,400 patients received negative results on their antibody tests.

While there have been suggestions that long-haulers are not, in fact, suffering from a coronavirus, Putrino and others have grown increasingly certain that's the case. One patient whose long-haul case was detailed in The Atlantic tested positive for the virus twice before testing negative for antibodies. "Just because you're negative for antibodies doesn't mean you didn't have COVID-19," Putrino said. Read more at The Atlantic.

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