August 24, 2020 – Researchers in Hong Kong say they have shown that a user can inflame twice with COVID-19.
There have been sporadic accounts on other people’s social media sites that claim to have had COVID twice. But scientists were skeptical of this possibility and said there is no evidence that this is happening.
The new evidence comes from a 33-year-old man in Hong Kong who first stuck COVID-19 in March. The coronavirus test was done after having a cough, sore throat, fever and headache for 3 days. He remained in the hospital until he gave two negative results for the virus in mid-April.
On 15 August, the boy returned to Hong Kong after a recent visit to Spain and the United Kingdom, regions that have recently noticed a resurgence of COVID-19 cases. At the airport, he was screened for COVID-19 using a saliva test to detect the virus. He tested positive, but this time he showed no symptoms. He was taken to the hospital for surveillance. His viral load, the amount of virus he had in his body, decreased over time, suggesting that his immune formula was dealing only with the intrusion.
The peculiarity of his case is that every time he was hospitalized, doctors sequenced the genome of the virus that had inflamed him. This was slightly different from infection to infection, suggesting that the virus had mutated, or replaced, within four months between infections. It also shows that it is conceivable that this coronavirus infects the same user twice.
World Health Organization experts to the case at a press conference on Monday.
“What we are told about the infection is that other people expand an immune reaction. What is not yet completely transparent is the strength of this immune reaction and the duration of this immune reaction,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, an epidemiologist for infectious diseases at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
A human case study is being prepared for publication in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Experts say the discovery does not raise alarms, but it has vital implications for the progression of collective immunity and efforts to expand vaccines and treatments.
“This turns out to be fairly transparent evidence of reinfection due to sequencing and isolation of two other viruses,” says Gregory Poland, MD, an expert in immunology and vaccine progression at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. “The big unknown is how this happens,” he says. More studies are needed to determine if this is a rare case or something that happens.
Until we know more, Poland says that the option to receive COVID-19 twice does not worry anyone.
This also happens with other types of coronavirus, which cause the non-unusual cold. These coronaviruses are slightly replaced each year as they progress around the world, allowing them to continue to spread and cause their most mundane misery.
This also happens with seasonal flu. That’s why other people want to get vaccinated against the flu year after year, and why the flu shot wants to be replaced every year to track the ever-changing flu virus.
“We have been manufacturing flu vaccines for 80 years and clinical trials are underway as we talk about new and flu vaccines,” says Poland.
There has been other evidence that the virus that causes COVID-19 can also be replaced in this way. Researchers at Rockefeller University’s Howard Hughes Medical Center in New York recently used a key component of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the genetic commands of its complex protein, to continuously infect human cells. Scientists have observed that each new generation of viruses infects a new batch of cells. Over time, when copied themselves, some of the copies replaced their genes to allow them after scientists attacked them with neutralizing antibodies. These antibodies are one of the main weapons used through the immune formula to recognize and deactivate a virus.
Although this study is still a prepress, meaning it has not yet been reviewed by outdoor experts, the authors wrote that their findings recommend that the virus could replace it to help it escape from our immune system. If this is true, they wrote in mid-July, meaning that reinfection is possible, especially in others who have a weak immune reaction to the virus the first time they find it.
This turns out to be true in the case of the Hong Kong man. When doctors tested his blood for antibodies to the virus, they didn’t discover any. This may simply mean that you had a weak immune reaction to the virus the first time, or that the antibodies you produced in your first infection decreased over time. But at the time of infection, he temporarily developed more antibodies, suggesting that by the time the infection acted as a reminder to activate his immune system. This is probably the explanation why I had no symptoms at the time.
This is good news, Poland says. This means that our framework can better combat the COVID-19 virus and that catching it once means that the time when it may not be so bad.
But the fact that the virus can be temporarily replaced in this way has an effect on efforts to expand a vaccine that works well.
“I think one possible implication of this is that we will have to administer booster doses. The question is howArray,” Poland says. This will count on how temporarily the virus evolves and how reinfection occurs in the genuine world.
“I’m a little surprised at the four-and-a-half months,” Poland says, referring to the time between Hong Kong man’s infections. “I’m not surprised, you know, that I got inflamed last winter and I became inflamed this winter,” he says.
It also suggests that immune treatments, such as convalescence plasma and monoclonal antibodies, may be limited over time, as the virus would possibly replace these treatments.
Convalescence plasma is necessarily a concentrated dose of antibodies from others who have recovered from COVID-19 infection. As the virus changes, antibodies in this plasma may not act as well for long-term infections.
Pharmaceutical corporations have learned to harness the strength of monoclonal antibodies as hard remedies for cancer and other diseases. Monoclonal antibodies, which are mass-produced in a laboratory, mimic the body’s herbal defenses opposite a pathogen. Just as the virus may be resistant to herbal immunity, it can replace it to help you circumvent lab-created remedies. Some pharmaceutical companies that expand monoclonal antibodies to combat COVID-19 are already prepared for this option by crafting antibody cocktails designed to deactivate the virus and block it in other locations, which can help you avoid resisting these therapies.
“We have a lot to learn,” Poland says. “Now that the evidence of the precept has been established, and I would say that he did so with this man, and with our wisdom of seasonal coronaviruses, we want to look more aggressively to outline how this happens.”
Gregory Poland, MD, Consultant, Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases; Consultant, Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.
Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, Infectious Diseases Epidemiologist, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland.
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