A doctor in Israel has been diagnosed with Covid-19 twice, months apart and after testing negative between the two swabs, according to local media.
The doctor, who had been working at the Sheba Medical Center in the city of Ramat Gan, four miles east of Tel Aviv, reportedly recovered from her first coronavirus attack.
He had tested positive in April, but recovered from the disease, which has infected some 55,000 in Israel, and then tested negative twice in May and June.
But this month, after coming into contact with an infected patient, the unidentified doctor has tested positive for Covid-19 again.
The case is one of a series of possible “reinfections” that raise questions about the immunity people develop after contracting the coronavirus and whether people can contract it more than once.
So far, there have been no scientifically proven cases that someone has caught him twice, and experts tend to blame inaccurate test results or prolonged illness. Some say it is not uncommon for parts of viruses to continue to circulate even after recovery.
The doctor had been working at Israel’s largest hospital, the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan (pictured). There is no suggestion that the photographed doctors are involved in the story.
The doctor reportedly tested positive for the coronavirus again after she had been in contact with an infected patient, The Times of Israel reported.
The report, initially from the country’s Channel 13 television news, implies that she was reinfected with the virus despite having recovered from it.
The traditional understanding of viruses suggests that people who have already had Covid-19 should develop a level of immunity that is at least temporary.
But cases like this call into question the idea of natural protection.
According to reports, a patient in the hospital had recently experienced the same phenomenon.
In addition to concerns about reinfection, there are also signs that people may simply remain ill for a long time with the virus still circulating in their bodies.
Professor Gabriel Izbicki of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem said it was “terrifying” how long people had been suffering from the disease.
He told the Times of Israel: “More than half of the patients, weeks after the negative test, are still symptomatic.”
The case is one of the numbers that seems to show people diagnosed with the coronavirus more than once.
A scientific paper entitled ‘A Case Report of a Possible New Reinfection of the Coronavirus 2019’ was recently published in the US, describing the case of an 82-year-old man who was hospitalized twice for the virus.
The unidentified man went to an emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital after suffering from a high fever for a week.
He tested positive for Covid-19 and then his condition quickly worsened while he was in the hospital.
Doctors managed to save his life with a long stay on a respirator, but he became ill again less than fifteen days later, despite having tested negative twice before being discharged.
He again needed intensive care and recovered a second time, although the state of his health was not disclosed later.
Doctors discussed in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine how it was possible for the man to recover and get negative results, but he became ill again.
His doctors said that instead of being infected twice, he likely never fully recovered the first time and that the tests were not sensitive enough to note that he still carried the virus.
Doctors, led by Dr. Nicole Duggan, said: ‘Many viruses demonstrate the prolonged presence of genetic material in a host even after removal of the live virus and symptomatic resolution.
‘Therefore, the detection of genetic material by [swab test] it alone does not necessarily correlate with active infection or infectivity.
“Observational data suggests that the viral spread of SARS-CoV-2 may last 20-22 days after onset of symptoms on average, and some peripheral cases exhibit spread up to 44 days.”
They said that in a 71-year-old woman, a study found that she continued to test positive for Covid-19 five weeks after her symptoms disappeared.
Because the virus was first discovered in December, scientists have not had a chance to find out how it affects people in the long term.
In a study by the University of Amsterdam, researchers suggested that coronaviruses may act in the same way as other coronaviruses that cause common colds and other infections.
The researchers followed 10 volunteers for 35 years and tested them every month for four weaker seasonal coronaviruses called NL63, 229E, OC43, and HKU1.
Those viruses are much more common and cause mild illnesses similar to the common cold.
They found that those who had been infected with the strains, from the same family as SARS-CoV-2, the type that causes Covid-19, had “alarmingly short protective immunity.”
Antibody levels, substances stored by the immune system to allow the body to fight off invaders in the future, decreased by 50 percent after half a year and completely disappeared after four years.
Studying how people recover from viruses in the same family that causes Covid-19, scientists say their research is the most comprehensive look at how immunity to the disease that emerged in China last year could work.
Writing in the study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal or reviewed by other scientists, the scientists said: “ Seasonal coronaviruses are the most representative group of viruses from which to conclude the general characteristics of coronaviruses, particularly common denominators such as the dynamics of immunity. and susceptibility to reinfection.
In conclusion, seasonal human coronaviruses have little in common other than causing a common cold.
Still, they all seem to induce short-lived immunity with rapid antibody loss. This may well be a general denominator for human coronaviruses.
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