Are there any people with MS who have had COVID-19 infection?
Are there any people with MS who have had COVID-19 infection?
Yes, there have been people with MS who have developed COVID-19. Most of the cases reported so far have been in Italy. The good news is that those who have been discussed on Twitter are doing well. The problem with Twitter is there is no follow-up and severe COVID-19 infection appears to be a delayed response typically occurring in week 2 after becoming symptomatic. This delayed deterioration is probably a result of an immune response to virus.
Interestingly, some people have hypothesised that pwMS on immunosuppression may actually be protected from the immune-mediated severe COVID-19 complications. To find out Italian and British neurologists are collecting all the clinical information patients with MS who develop COVID-19 infection to find out what happens to them. Therefore if you are an Italian or British patient who develops COVID-19 please tell your MS team so that they can enroll you in these studies.
A problem I see emerging is that a lot of pwMS who have mild COVID-19 infections who self-isolate and recover spontaneously may not be enrolled in these studies. To address this reporting bias it is going to be important to do follow-up seroprevalence studies to assess how many of you have asymptomatic or mild COVID-19 infections.