A man in Hong Kong contracts COVID-19 twice 0:51
(CNN Spanish) - This Monday, researchers from the University of Hong Kong announced the first human case of covid-19 reinfection. The report, which will be published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, presents the case of a 33-year-old man who tested positive for the virus in March, recovered and was infected again 4 months later, being asymptomatic in this second infection.
In this episode, Dr. Elmer Huerta explains to us how he was diagnosed and why this case is important.
You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform, or read the transcript below.
Hello, I am Dr. Elmer Huerta and this is your daily dose of information about the new coronavirus, which we hope will be useful to take care of your health and that of your family. Today we will see that Hong Kong researchers document the first case of covid-19 reinfection in humans.
Without fear of being wrong, one of the most frequent questions we receive is whether a person who has already overcome covid-19 can become infected again.
Until now, our answer was that it was not known, that there were no scientific studies that have proven it, until on Monday, a group of researchers at the University of Hong Kong announced the demonstration of the first human case of reinfection by the new coronavirus.
His work has not yet been published, but according to the university report, it has been accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Here is the press release: pic.twitter.com/oLruPSMdPV
- Lilian Cheng (@cwylilian) August 24, 2020
According to the report, a 33-year-old man, previously healthy, developed mild symptoms of Covid-19 in late March and was hospitalized on the 29th of that month, being discharged on April 14. The molecular test on that occasion was positive, isolating the covid-19.
Four and a half months later, the man visited Spain and returned to Hong Kong, stopping in London.
Upon arrival in Hong Kong, the individual, who is asymptomatic, underwent a new molecular test to look for the virus in his respiratory tract, which was positive on August 15.
When a new virus was isolated, the researchers suspected a reinfection and compared the genome of the two viruses, the March and the August.
That was a very important test, because it showed important differences in the genome of the viruses, differences so important that according to the researchers they show that the man had two infections.
The virus genomes are different in 24 nucleotides of their RNA, and in the sequence of nine proteins, showing a different sequence of 58 amino acids present only in the second genome of the first infection.
This allows us to say that the viruses belong to different clans or lineages, which, according to the researchers, shows that the patient was infected by two different viruses.
On the other hand, the fact that the two viruses are genetically different rules out the possibility that man has had persistent infection by the same virus, in which case, the two viruses would have been identical.
The researchers conclude that this first case of reinfection - demonstrated with a genetic examination of the viruses - has profound implications for the control of the disease.
On the one hand, it shows that reinfection is possible, and second, that even people who have suffered the disease should be vaccinated, when that vaccine is available, something that had already been suggested when it was discovered that antibodies decrease after a few months of the initial infection.
What is not yet clear is the true frequency of reinfection, according to the technical director of covid-19 at the World Health Organization, after 24 million infections and the description of a single case of reinfection, they are missing further research to determine if reinfection is common, or an exception to the rule.
Send me your questions on Twitter, we will try to answer them in our next episodes. You can find me at @DrHuerta.
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