The curious case of the SF doctor who’s been coronavirus-positive nearly 90 days and counting
May 30, 2020 11:37 a.m.
Dr. Coleen Kivlahan knew what the result of her coronavirus test would be the moment she stepped outside her San Francisco home and sensed she was smelling a forest fire, a symptom that can accompany loss of smell.
Then that persistent cough kicked in. Those are two of the lasting symptoms. So it was no surprise that she tested positive on Wednesday. The surprise was that it had been at least 85 days that she has been infected with the coronavirus and 62 days since she first tested positive. That she is both alive and still has symptoms may be some kind of record for longevity for suffering the disease without hospitalization.
“I belong to the very small club of persistent positives,” said Kivlahan, who is executive medical director for all primary care at UC San Francisco. She has seen some 60 UCSF colleagues come down with the coronavirus, almost all going through a miserable few weeks and then test negative and be allowed to return to work.
For Kivlahan, the worst of the symptoms are over. She narrowly avoided hospitalization and the dreaded intubation. She is able to get out of bed and even enjoy the luxury of walking up a flight of stairs. But she has lived essentially in isolation with her husband at their home in Crocker-Amazon since March 6, 10 days before the citywide shelter-in-place order, and has no idea when it will end.
“We don’t know why I am persistently positive and when I am going to turn negative,” she said in a phone interview following her test on Wednesday. “I’m anxious to join the world again.”
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at UCSF, does not know Kivlahan and is unfamiliar with her case. But this is the first time he has heard of a patient still testing positive for the coronavirus nearly three months after infection. Within eight days of the onset of symptoms, the virus is normally dead.
“I would be shocked if that is live virus,” he said of Kivlahan’s positive test this week. “My gut sense is that it is persistent fragments of the virus. This patient may be the exception, but no one really knows.”
Chin-Hong said there are not enough data yet on COVID-19 survivors, but with other viruses there have been survivors who develop chronic symptoms like the ones Kivlahan cannot shake.
“This is a club,” she says, “that I don’t want to be in.”
Kivlahan, who is 66 and in otherwise excellent health, is not sure when she joined the club. It was either Feb. 25 or March 3, the last two days she took time away from her administrative and faculty duties to work in the urgent care clinic at UCSF Parnassus.
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