PARIS – Patients with COVID-19 may have more severe symptoms at the time they become infected, according to a study published Tuesday confirming that it is possible to contract the life-threatening disease more than once.
The patient, a 25-year-old Nevada man, inflamed with two distinct variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus guilty of COVID-19, within 48 days.
The document noted that 4 others showed cases of re-infection worldwide, with one patient in Belgium, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Ecuador.
Experts said the prospect of reinfection can have a profound effect on how the world is fighting the pandemic.
In particular, this may influence the search for a vaccine, the existing holy grail of pharmaceutical research.
“The option of reinfections can have significant implications for our understanding of COVID-19 immunity, especially in the absence of an effective vaccine,” said Mark Pandori of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory and study director.
“We want more studies to see how long immunity can last for others exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and why some of these momentary, though rare, infections occur as more serious.
Vaccines work by triggering the body’s herbal immune reaction to a safe pathogen, arming it with antibodies to combat long-term waves of infection.
For some diseases, such as measles, the infection confers immunity for life; for pathogens, immunity can be ephemeral at best.
The authors claimed that the American patient may have been exposed to a very high dose of the virus at the time, prompting a sharper reaction.
Alternatively, it would possibly be a more virulent strain of the virus.
Other speculation is a mechanism known as antibody-dependent reinforcement, i. e. when antibodies aggravate next infections, such as dengue.
Researchers noted that reinfection of any kind remains rare, with a handful of cases shown from tens of millions of Covid-19 infections worldwide.
However, as many cases are asymptomatic and therefore unlikely to have initially tested positive, it would be possible to know if a given Covid-19 case is the first or first infection.
In an observation similar to The Lancet, Akiko Iwasaka, professor of immunobiology and molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale University, said the findings may have an effect on public fitness measures.
“As more and more cases of reinfection arise, the clinical network will have the opportunity to increase the protective correlations and how often herbal SARS-CoV-2 infections induce this point of immunity,” he said.
“This data is essential for perceiving which vaccines can cross this threshold to confer individual and collective immunity,” added Iaka, who was not involved in the study.
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