According to doctors, a Nevada man who had suffered a bout of COVID-19 in the past became inflamed a second time with even worse symptoms.
This is the first documented case of reinfection in the United States, a rare occasion that nevertheless suggests that having had COVID-19 does not automatically confer immunity.
The 25-year-old’s case was reported in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, which describes how the man, from Washoe County, developed his first symptoms on March 25.
With a sore throat, cough, headache, nausea and diarrhea, he went to a network on April 18 and tested positive for the coronavirus. He did not have any underlying disease or immune weakness. After isolating for nine days, her symptoms disappeared and she recovered.
He took two tests in May, and both were negative. But two days after his second negative test, he felt unwell again and a June 5 test came back positive, this time with symptoms that sent him to the hospital. It has since recovered.
According to the study, differences in the genetic sequencing of the virus indicated that the new infection did not only recur the initial latent infection.
The chances of the same strain mutating into a single user at that time are “low,” the report says. He also ruled out the option of the man becoming inflamed with either strain but that one of them remained dormant until later.
The Lancet Infectious Diseases report confirms the first non-peer-reviewed results, in an online preprint in August.
During the second infection, the man discovered he had shortness of breath and hypoxic, meaning his blood lacked oxygen, so he was sent to the emergency room for oxygen, according to the report.
It is not yet clear why the momentary infection is worse than the first, but the authors of the report recommend 3 possibilities:
Discussions about immunity after infection have sparked even more intense interest than ever since President Donald Trump’s doctors announced that he had recovered from the virus, as Business Insider’s John Haltiwanger reported.
The president has continually claimed that he is now “immune,” a claim that Twitter has called “misleading. “As Business Insider’s Morgan McFall-Johnsen reported, the science is far from conclusive.
The findings from the Lancet Infectious Diseases have “significant” implications for how we perceive immunity, Dr Mark Pandori, associate professor of pathology at the University of Nevada and co-author of theArray, told the BBC.
“Our findings imply that a past infection does not necessarily oppose a long-term infection,” he said.
Paul Hunter, a professor at the University of East Anglia, told the BBC that the findings were “very worrying”.
But he pointed out that we would have already found out if this were common.
There have only been a handful of proven cases of reinfection with the virus: one Hong Kong man reported as one of the cases in August, followed temporarily by two more cases in Belgium and the Netherlands. Ecuadorian reinfection also showed, according to the study.
“It’s too early to say for sure what the implications of those findings will be for a vaccination programme,” Hunter told the BBC. “But those findings are the fact that we still don’t know enough about the immune reaction to this infection. “
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