Just hours after the world’s first case of coronavirus reinfection documented in Hong Kong on Monday, researchers reported that a woman in Belgium had contracted the virus for a second time. So did Dutch virus experts, who announced that an elderly user in the Netherlands had reinfection with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, for the third time.
The experts used genetic tests, in which they compare the versions of the virus provided in the first and second infections, to verify that these reinfections were distinct one-off cases and only persistent effects of people’s first infections.
But just because some COVID-19 reinfections have begun to appear among the more than 23. 69 million documented coronavirus cases worldwide doesn’t mean that a first coronavirus infection doesn’t do anything to protect other people from long-term illness, or that a vaccine would. It may not help prevent the disease. Coming out of this pandemic.
“I don’t want other people to be afraid,” Maria van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical director for COVID-19, said Monday when asked about the reinfection case in Hong Kong. “We want to make sure other people understand that when they are infected, even if they have a mild infection, they generate an immune response. “
The case of reinfection in the Netherlands, diagnosed in an elderly user with a weakened immune system, was shown to Business Insider on Tuesday through Erasmus MC, where virologist Marion Koopmans works. (His knowledge of the case has not yet been made public, and Erasmus cited Dutch privacy legislation when asked for details. )
“The fact that you have developed antibodies means that you are immune,” Koopmans said in an interview about the reinfection case with Dutch public broadcaster NOS.
But even if a person doesn’t develop full immunity to a virus, and gets reinfected, the body seems to remember its previous illnesses. In addition to antibodies, T cells and other components of a person’s immune system all work together to better fight back an active infection the second time around.
This turns out to be what happened in Belgium, where a woman in her fifties, already affected by the coronavirus in March, was diagnosed with a second phase in June.
Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst has not yet made his claim public, but he said the woman developed very few antibodies after her first infection and speculated that could be why she was vulnerable to reinfection (even though her second case was mild). Training
“We would have liked the time between two infections to be longer,” Van Ranst told Belgian public broadcaster VRT. “The antibodies from the first time are not enough to save you at the time of infection. ”
He said more of these seemingly rare reinfection cases will likely continue to pop up in the coming months, as people’s immunity to the coronavirus (from their previous infections) wanes.
“Maybe more people will get it a second time after six or nine months,” he said.
The two of reinfections in Europe bring the official number of coronavirus reinfections to three, among tens of millions.
Previous reports of 260 reinfections in South Korea in April turned out to be persistent cases of the same infection. Another possible case of reinfection was reported in the United States in June, and three more were reported in France in July. But those cases were not thought to show reinfections because less time passed between positive tests and scientists did not genetically sequence the viruses.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong announced Monday that “the world’s first documentation of a patient who recovered from COVID-19 but then had a COVID-19 attack” will be published in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
A 33-year-old, seemingly healthy man who had been sick in March was diagnosed with the novel coronavirus a second time after traveling back to Hong Kong from Spain earlier this month.
While he had a fever, cough and headache in his first COVID-19 illness, the man had no symptoms in his second infection.
Many epidemiologists hope that such coronavirus reinfections are possible.
“You can continually become inflamed once your immunity wanes,” Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist and virus expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, told Business Insider when asked about coronavirus immunity.
These three cases do not explain why to panic. Instead, they show how past infections can provide people with good coverage unlike any other coronavirus disease.
“That someone would pop up with a reinfection, it doesn’t make me nervous,” Koopmans told Reuters. “We have to see whether it happens often.”
Indeed, Krammer predicted (just as these reinfection cases suggest) that a patient’s second tangle with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, will generally be less severe than their first: “It’s very likely that if you did get reinfected after some time, it would be an attenuated disease,” he said.
The same could be true of coronavirus vaccines, once they’re developed: even if they don’t protect people from infection at 100%, vaccines could help our immune systems battle this illness better.
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