A doctor in Israel has reportedly been reinfected with COVID-19, three months after his first attack with the coronavirus.
While there have been several reports of COVID-19 reinfection globally, the news comes amid ongoing uncertainty in the scientific community about whether long-term immunity is possible after infection.
Channel 13 Israel reported that a doctor at Ramat Gan Sheba Medical Center first contracted the virus in April, according to the Times of Israel, while testing negative for COVID-19 in May and June. Now, after coming into contact with an infected individual, she again tested positive.
While doctors have observed antibodies in many patients immediately after illness, there is concern that they may not last long in the body or that some patients may not develop antibodies naturally.
Unfortunately, problems with testing and inaccurate results have made the antibody and immunity study even more difficult to reach, and the studies point to a false-negative rate of at least 20% and up to 38%.
Last month, a couple of studies revealed that patients can quickly lose the antibodies they produced during their battle with the coronavirus, months or weeks after recovery. In a report uploaded to the open-access source medRxiv, while awaiting peer review, researchers in Wuhan, China found that the antibodies were undetectable in 10% of nearly 1,500 patients with COVID-19, just a few weeks after the first signs of the virus. Based on their findings, they determined that “after SARS-CoV-2 infection, people are unlikely to produce durable protective antibodies against this virus.”
The other article, published in Nature Medicine, compared antibody levels between 37 asymptomatic coronavirus-positive patients and an equal number of patients with severe symptoms, based in the Wanzhou district of China. After two or three months, 60% of asymptomatic individuals showed detectable levels of antibodies, while 87% of those with strong symptoms continued to demonstrate higher levels of antibodies. This suggests that those who do not develop serious illness due to COVID-19 may also be less protected in the future.
The seemingly inconsistent nature of antibodies to the coronavirus is, like all things with this disease, unknown territory. Compare these findings with what doctors know about SARS and MERS: two other types of coronavirus infections whose antibodies are known to potentially persist for a year or more after the onset of illness.
Earlier this month, White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said “we don’t know” how long antibodies against coronavirus can offer defense. He said to the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Francis Collins: “With this spike protein that presents itself the way we do with cousins and in some cases increases, we are going to assume that there is some degree of protection, but we have to assume that it will be finite. “
Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said coronavirus therapy “[is] it’s not going to be like the measles vaccine, “which provides lifelong immunity
That said, he is skeptical of recent reports of reinfection, arguing that trace levels of COVID-19 likely remained in the body the entire time, regardless of the negative results of previous tests.
“There are no documented cases where people got better and really got sick again in the sense of virus replication,” he said. “I would not be surprised if there is a rare case of a person going into remission and relapsing … But Francis, I can confidently say, it is highly unlikely to be a common phenomenon.”
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