On the evening of April 6, Bai Yansong connected with Liu Youning, head of the military support Hubei front expert group and a respiratory specialist at the PLA General Hospital, who said that as the epidemic extends, individual healthy people have been found to be carriers of the virus, called healthy virus carriers.
What is a healthy virus carrier, and why do healthy people carry the virus?
According to the interview by Prof. Liu and Ning, they found that there are individual healthy people, who carry the new coronavirus, and these people have the following characteristics.
1) Positive nucleic acid test on pharyngeal swab.
2) negative for antibodies to the new coronavirus on multiple consecutive, multi-day blood draws
3) The patient was "healthy" from the beginning to the end, without any discomfort.
4) A very clear epidemiological history.
Based on these points, we can know that this group of people is positive for viral nucleic acid, but their bodies do not produce antibodies and they do not develop the disease.
How to distinguish from asymptomatic infected people?
According to the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia Prevention and Control Program (6th Edition) issued by the National Health and Wellness Commission, an asymptomatic infected person is one who has no associated clinical symptoms (e.g., self-perceived or clinically recognizable signs and symptoms such as fever, cough, sore throat, etc.), but whose respiratory and other specimens are positive for neo-coronavirus pathogenesis (usually referred to as nucleic acid testing) or serum-specific immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibody testing.
Healthy virus carriers are also nucleic acid positive but asymptomatic, so, in a strict sense, healthy virus carriers are also a special type of asymptomatic infected person.
However, there is a difference from what we usually understand as an asymptomatic person. An asymptomatic person may indeed be nucleic acid positive, but as the disease progresses, our body's immune system reacts to the virus and produces specific antibodies to destroy the virus.
So, as time progresses, an asymptomatic infected person, in the traditional sense, will have antibodies in their body that will destroy the virus, and that's when a blood test for antibodies is positive.
This is the difference between an asymptomatic infected person, who can destroy the virus, and a virus carrier, who may carry the virus for a long time and cannot be cleared.
What are the threats to healthy virus carriers?
First of all, it should be clear that the presence of live virus in the body of healthy virus carriers has not been determined. A positive nucleic acid test may be a dead virus fragment or a live virus, and there is no way to distinguish it by doing nucleic acid tests.
So, let's not get overly nervous, but we need to stay alert.
If there is indeed a live virus in the body, then it is very dangerous and such a person is worse than an asymptomatic infected person.
Because these healthy virus carriers, who have the virus in their bodies, but do not develop the disease and cannot produce antibodies to destroy the virus in their bodies, then he may become a mobile source of infection and can transmit the virus to others.
Such a person acts as an intermediate host, and the new coronavirus and he reaches a balance, not harming each other, just like bats, which carry a variety of coronaviruses in their bodies, which do not cause bats to get sick, but can be transmitted to other animals or humans through bats.
