SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Persistence throughout the Human Body and Brain

Date/Time: 19 December 2022, 11:00 A.M.
Speaker: Daniel S. Chertow, M.D., M.P.H.
Speaker Affiliation: Tenure-Track Investigator, Critical Care Medicine, Department National Institutes of Health Clinical Center and Laboratory of Immunoregulation, NIAID, Bethesda, Maryland
Venue: Zoom + John A. Burns School of Medicine, Kakaako Campus, 651 Ilalo Street, MEB Auditorium (Room 315), Hon 96813

For more info: Axel Lehrer: lehrer@hawaii.edu
Description: COVID-19 is known to cause multi-organ dysfunction during acute infection with SARS-CoV-2, with some patients experiencing prolonged symptoms. However, the burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and time to viral clearance is not well characterized, particularly in the brain. We carried out complete autopsies on 44 patients who died with COVID-19, with extensive sampling of the central nervous system in 11 of these patients, to map and quantify the distribution, replication, and cell-type specificity of SARS-CoV-2. We show that SARS-CoV-2 is widely distributed, and that virus replication is present in multiple respiratory and non-respiratory tissues, including the brain, early in infection. Further, we detected persistent SARS-CoV-2 RNA in multiple anatomic sites, including throughout the brain, as late as 230 days following symptom onset.
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