Review Article
Year: 2020 | Month: April-June | Volume: 5 | Issue: 2 | Pages: 349-355
HIV and COVID-19 Comorbidity: Current Evidence
Adeniyi David Segun
Technical Officer – Directorate of Laboratory Services – APIN Public Health Initiatives, Jos, Nigeria.
ABSTRACT
The spread of the COVID-19 has now crossed all known human borders with so much virulence and defiance to the acclaimed international efforts aimed at mitigating its impacts. The emergence of this disease in December 2019 at Wuhan in China has left the world in tatters; with collapsed national economies, massive loss of jobs and sources of livelihoods, a redefining of social ethics and concourse, and a restructuring of the ethos that guide our national ways of life. The increased risk of severe disease with COVID-19 is closely associated with advanced age (>50 years), male gender, hypertension, diabetes, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases, Cardiovascular diseases, and Cerebrovascular diseases. People Living With HIV are most prone to increased morbidity, and the advent of the COVID-19 has now created an additional comorbid burden on the over 37.9 million PLWH globally. There is no known cure or effective treatment for COVID-19 as at yet, but there are promising therapeutic alternatives. People Living With HIVstands a better chance of a positive disease outcome when infected with COVID-19 provided their viral load is suppressed, if they are on an active HIV Antiretroviral Therapy, if they have a high CD4 T-helper cells counts (>200 cells/µL), and provided they have no underlying chronic diseases conditions. Some studies have shown that a dysregulated immune response might be responsible for conferring some level of protection against the SARS-CoV-2 virus infection in HIV patients. Thus, the disease outcome of People Living with HIV who are co-infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus is no different from the prognostic outlook of any averagely healthy individual infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus without any underlying chronic health conditions.
Keywords: COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, HIV, Comorbidity, PLWH