(Yicai Global) March 11 -- The Covid-19 virus is able to continue spawning itself for up to 37 days from the onset of illness, according to a recent study of patients in the disease epicenter of Wuhan in China. The findings have important implications for the duration of patient treatment and isolation, which are currently based on a two week-long period of contagion.

Prolonged viral shedding provides the rationale for a strategy of isolation of infected patients and optimal antiviral interventions in the future, according to a team of 19 experts in respiratory infections who published their findings in the Lancet, the world's leading general medical journal, on March 9.

On average, viral spawning lasted for 20 days from the first day of symptoms being reported, said Cao Bin, team leader and vice president of Beijing's China-Japan Friendship Hospital. The virus will die upon the extermination of the host, he added.

The team studied the pathology of 191 adult patients admitted to the Jinyintan and Wuhan Pulmonary hospitals, the first medical centers to start receiving Covid-19 cases at the end of last year. They were aged between 18 and 87 years old and were mainly men.

Sepsis was the most frequently observed complication with over half of the patients developing a bacterial infection in the bloodstream or body tissues, according to the paper Clinical Course and Risk Factors for Mortality of Adult Inpatients With Covid-19 in Wuhan, China: a Retrospective Cohort Study. On admission, no bacterial pathogens were detected in the patients. Further research is needed to investigate the connection between sepsis and the novel coronavirus, it added.

Elderly patients, those with a higher sequential organ failure assessment score and with elevated levels of d-dimer, a protein fragment produced when blood clots are dissolved in the blood, were all at a higher risk of dying from Covid-19, it said.

Of the 191 patients, 137 recovered and 54 succumbed to the disease. That 28 percent death rate does not reflect the true mortality rate of the novel coronavirus as the study only took into account those patients who had left the hospital or had died by Jan. 31, Cao said.

Mortality rates in China, excluding the disease epicenter of Hubei province, are under 1 percent. Hubei province, with the exception of Wuhan, has a rate of 3 percent and Wuhan itself has one of between 4 percent and 5 percent.

Editor: Kim Taylor