“I have neurological problems, cognitive problems, problems with putting words together,” he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday. “It is everywhere and I am incredibly tired.”
As health experts work to control the virus, stories like Hedgecock’s raise concerns about whether people can be reinfected and whether collective immunity is possible.
Hedgecock first tested positive for coronavirus on April 20. On May 9, it tested negative, he said.
Almost two weeks later, an oral and nasal swab test was done. The oral test was negative, but the nasal test was positive.
A week later, another test was negative, he said.
And he still has symptoms, he said. Any effort can take her to bed for days, and now she is taking medication for daily headaches, she said.
It is not clear that the second positive test means that Hedgecock became infected again. It is possible that he initially received false negative results or the positive was misleading, said CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta.
“We are not yet receiving documented cases of reinfections … That does not mean they will not come,” said Gupta. “If people lost their immunity, I think now, six months after this, we would be seeing significant amounts of reinfection.”
Some types of coronavirus tests have a false negative rate of 15-20%, he told Cuomo on Wednesday.
“If that’s the case, people have been walking with a false sense of security for a long time,” said Hedgecock. “And that is a problem”.
The positive test after infection could come from testing for genetic material from the virus, Gupta said. The identified genetic material could be a sign that the virus is present, or it could be remains that the virus left behind, he said.
“We are all learning,” said Gupta.
Recent studies have investigated immunity after coronavirus infection.
“These (studies) are very important to the future of this epidemic,” Dr. William Haseltine, a former professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, at OutFront, told Erin Monday.
Haseltine said a recent study that found that people who have been infected with the new coronavirus could see that their immunity declines in a matter of months is just “what we feared.”
If the results turn out to be true, Haseltine said, they could have implications for infected people, for the idea of achieving collective immunity against the virus and for the development of a vaccine.
CNN’s Andrea Kane contributed to this report.
.
