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An 89-year-old Dutch woman, one of 25 known SARS-CoV-2 reinfection cases in the world, He died from the effects of the second time he fell ill with covid-19, aggravated by a rare form of bone marrow cancer he suffered, thus becoming the first known death from a coronavirus reinfection.
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As explained by virologist Marion Koopmans on Tuesday, the patient had to be admitted to the hospital in the first wave of infections after developing symptoms such as a high fever and strong cough. The woman was discharged after five days and was negative in two PCRs that she was subjected to after the symptoms disappeared.
The Dutch patient also suffered from a disease known as Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia, a rare form of bone marrow cancer, so his immune system had been affected for months.
Two months after overcoming covid-19, the woman began new chemotherapy sessions, but began to have a fever, cough and suffer from severe shortness of breath only two days later, for which she was readmitted to the hospital.
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She was also subjected to a PCR in which she tested positive. But he tested negative in two serological tests to see if he still had antibodies to the virus in his blood after the first time he was infected.
Surely he died in the end from the coronavirus
After eight days of hospital admission, the patient’s health status deteriorated drastically and he died two weeks later.
“She probably died in the end from the coronavirus, but she was also very sick,” Koopmans, who is participating in a follow-up of reinfections being carried out by the University of Oxford, told the local press.
The Dutch virologist highlighted that currently there are around 25 known cases of reinfections worldwide, and in most of them less severe symptoms developed than during the first infection.
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Thus, scientists assume that reinfections remain “exceptions”, although Koopmans believes that “there will be more” but clarifies that “the important question remains whether this is something typical of covid-19”, because in many cases, the second infection occurred just two months after the first infection.
Although he hopes that most people who have overcome a first infection with coronavirus are now protected “for a longer time” against covid-19, he acknowledged that, in any case, “This won’t last a lifetime because you’ve never seen that with any respiratory virus.”
It is not yet clear what knowledge of these specific cases could mean when developing the vaccine against the virus, nor the extent to which the immune system learns enough during the first infectionBut the antibodies produced naturally after an initial infection seem to disappear relatively quickly in some people.
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EFE
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