The 25-year-old from Nevada has tested positive for two different strains.
Earlier this week, the world was moving forward with what was believed to be the world’s first documented case of coronavirus reinfection in Hong Kong.
Now, less than a week later, researchers in the United States are reporting the first documented case of their patient who got covid, recovered and then found him again.
Scientists say that although refinement is possible, it is very rare. This is the first documented retrieval of nearly 6 million COVID-19 cases to date.
Nevertheless, the first documented resection of the patient’s re-infection after his initial recovery is noteworthy.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t get it again,” Dr. Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory and co-author of the study, told ABC. “World News Tonight.” “It probably tells us things we still don’t know about this virus … or there’s a fear that even if you do, your immune system will prevent you from developing a significant illness next time.” Will not secure. “
The case report, which has not yet been peer-reviewed and is currently only available as a print edition, tells the story of a 25-year-old man in Nevada. In late March, he developed some excellent signs of Covid-19: sore throat, cough, diarrhea, headache, and nausea. After testing positive on April 18, it slowly began to get better, and the virus appeared to leave its system, mostly tested in May with two consecutive negative tests.
But just a few weeks later, he started getting sick again, testing positive for COVID-19 once again in June. At this time, he was hospitalized with severe symptoms.
At first, the researchers wondered if the virus had been hiding in his body all the time – mutations, mutations, and eventually evolving into something that made him sick for the second time with Covid-1. But in the end, they rejected the theory, saying that the two viruses were so different that it would be almost impossible to change the virus quickly inside his body. The only explanation was that he was infected with a slightly different version of the coronavirus.
“There is no impermeability here,” Pandori told ABC News. “Whether you have been infected before or have been vaccinated in the future, there will be no such thing as permeability.”
While eagerly awaiting effective vaccines, how the world tries to limit the spread of coronavirus could affect the outcome. Experts had long expected that humans would have some kind of immunity after being infected with the coronavirus, but no one is sure how long that immunity will last. This new rescheduling provides important data rather than experts rushing to determine it.
Dr. Ak Akiko Iwasaki, a professor in the Department of Immunobiology at Yale University, wrote on Twitter that the patient’s case was different from that of a Hong Kong patient because it did not appear to help fight the virus from his previous infection.
“This time, unlike in the case of Hong Kong, the immune system did not protect this person from re-infection or disease,” she wrote in a tweet.
However, scientists interviewed by ABC News say these separate case reports cannot be applied to the average person. It is not yet clear if the 25-year-old has any underlying conditions that could put him at risk of developing a more serious illness.
What remains to be seen is how many such common reflection events there are and whether they will continue into the next month.
Netwood, MD, is a resident of Yale New Haven Hospital and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.
.
