Megan Kent, 37, a medical speech pathologist living outside Boston, first tested positive for the virus on March 30, after her boyfriend became ill. She remembered that she couldn’t smell or taste anything, but otherwise it felt good. After a 14-day quarantine, she returned to work at Melrose Wakefield Hospital and also helped in a nursing home.
On May 8, Mrs. Kent suddenly felt ill. “I felt like a Mack truck hit me,” he said. She slept all weekend and went to the hospital on Monday, convinced that she had mononucleosis. The next day, she tested positive for the coronavirus again. She was ill for almost a month and has since learned that she has antibodies.
“This time it was a hundred times worse,” he said. “Was I reinfected?”
There are other more plausible explanations of what Kent experienced, experts said. “I’m not saying it can’t happen. But from what I’ve seen so far, that would be a rare phenomenon, “said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine.
Mrs. Kent may not have fully recovered, although she felt better, for example. The virus may have been secreted to certain parts of the body, as the Ebola virus is known to do, and then reappeared. The test was not done between the two positives, but even if it had been, faulty tests and low viral levels can produce a false negative.
Given these more likely scenarios, Dr. Mina had words of choice for the doctors who caused panic over reports of reinfections. “This is so bad that people have lost their minds,” he said. “It’s just a sensational click bait.”
In the first weeks of the pandemic, some people in China, Japan, and South Korea tested positive twice, raising similar fears.
The South Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated 285 of those cases and found that several of the second positives came two months after the first, and in one case 82 days later. Almost half of the people had symptoms on the second test. But the researchers were unable to grow live viruses from any of the samples, and the infected people had not spread the virus to others.