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A scientific study documented the first case of reinfection by the new coronavirus in Colombia in a woman who had two different Sars-CoV-2 lineages in less than two months.
The research was published this Friday in the scientific journal and was in charge of Juan David Ramírez, Marina Muñoz, Nathalia Ballesteros, Luz H. Patiño and Sergio Castañeda, from the Center for Research in Microbiology and Biotechnology of the Universidad del Rosario; as well as Carlos Rincón, Claudia Méndez, Carolina Oliveros, Julie Pérez, Elizabeth K. Márquez and Frank de los Santos Ortiz, from the Army’s Research Group on Tropical Diseases.
Specifically, the authors analyzed the cases of three patients who tested positive in PCR tests performed months apart.
Two were classified as possible cases of persistent covid-19, something that was confirmed by reviewing the genomic sequences of the extracted samples, which confirmed that it was the presence of the same lineage.
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However, the third case was a 54-year-old woman who began symptoms on July 9, with a cough, fever, odynophagia, and fatigue tested positive for Sars-CoV-2 on July 13. She was given a follow-up test on August 3 and it came back negative. But on August 12, she again presented recurrent fever and odynophagia and the result of a new PCR test was positive again.
This patient, according to the study, had high blood pressure, gastritis and osteoarthritis, diseases for which she was receiving treatment.
Genomic analysis of the two positive samples from this woman revealed that They were two independent infections, the first by lineage B.1 and the second by B.1.1.269, “Which are phylogenetically distant,” according to the study.
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“The B.1 lineage is very frequent in Colombia, in around 40 percent of all the Colombian genomes studied for Sars-CoV-2 reported to date ”, the study mentions.
However, the researchers indicate that It was the first time that the lineage B.1.1.269 was identified in the country, “Closely related to genomes first identified in Nigeria and Brazil.”
“This case also highlights the need to continue strengthening efforts to improve genomic surveillance and expand sequencing capacity in the country, since the number of genomes currently available is scarce (less than 1 percent of positive cases of covid- 19 have been sequenced) ”, they point out.
It is worth mentioning that this patient made a full recovery after the second infection and at that time she had no severe symptoms of covid-19; “However, this case highlights the vulnerabilities of the body’s immune response when challenged by different variants or even between lineages that descend from the same main lineage (B as in this case).”
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It should be noted that according to the National Institute of Health, more than 90 patients had previously been studied as possible cases of covid-19 reinfection, “most of whom have not been able to complete the study cycle due to poor quality of old samples, or laboratory results that did not allow genomic sequencing and others were discarded ”.
This is the first in which it is possible to verify in Colombia through genomic sequencing that the same patient was infected twice with different lineages of Sars-CoV-2.
In any case, just this week a study was revealed in The Lancet magazine that shows that covid-19 reinfections are “rare”, although “more common” in people over 65 who have protection of only 47 per cent. one hundred against a second contagion, compared to 80 percent of the youngest individuals.
HEALTH UNIT
