When AIDS and Novel Coronavirus Coincide: Is the Patient at Risk of Becoming a Mutated Virus Incubator?

As less affluent countries around the world scramble to get the vaccine and fight the disease, researchers in South Africa have just made a worrying discovery: AIDS could exacerbate the disease.

Geneticists and infectious disease experts have identified a potentially dangerous novel coronavirus mutation in a 36-year-old South African woman, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Eight months ago, the woman was infected with Novel Coronavirus.
She was also previously infected with HIV.
The researchers said the mutation in the novel coronavirus in the woman may have been caused by the failure of her HIV treatment and impaired immune response.

Prior to the South African woman, there was little evidence that people infected with HIV might complicate the trajectory of COVID-19.
It is understood that HIV positive patients are not likely to be infected with novel coronavirus.
But Tulio de Oliveira, a geneticist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, said the case of the South African woman showed that AIDS patients could “become the world’s factory for novel coronavirus variants.”

It is reported that there are nearly 10 million people living with HIV worldwide.
If they are also infected with a novel coronavirus, their immune system is damaged by HIV, which is likely to cause a mutation of the novel coronavirus.
This has raised concerns that AIDS could complicate efforts to eradicate COVID-19.
In less than a year and a half, COVID-19 has killed more than 3.5 million people.

Jonathan Li, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was one of the first doctors to document a major novel coronavirus mutation in an immunologically compromised patient who died more than five months after being infected.
That led doctors to realize that patients like him could be powerful incubators of novel coronavirus variants.

Jonathan Lee’s largest group of patients are those with AIDS.
From the moment a potentially dangerous novel coronavirus mutation was found in AIDS patients, he said, he prayed that HIV-infected people would not be the source of mutations that could make the novel coronavirus variant more infectious or harder to prevent and treat.

It is unclear whether the Novel Coronavirus mutation carried by the South African woman is contagious.
But researchers say it may not be a coincidence that a dangerous new strain of the virus is emerging in a population like South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, where more than a quarter of adults are infected with HIV.

South Africa has nearly 2.2 million untreated people living with HIV, but as of May 31, only 183,000 people had been vaccinated, prompting health authorities to fear a new outbreak.

India is currently the worst hit country in the world by COVID-19, with nearly 1 million people living with HIV not receiving treatment.
Only 12% of Indians have been vaccinated against COVID-19, while 3.2% have been fully vaccinated.