By Erika Edwards and Akshay Syal - NBC News
A Nevada man appears to be the first confirmed case of COVID-19 reinfection in the country, according to scientific research that has yet to be officially reviewed and published.
The case involves a 25-year-old man living in Reno, Nevada, who first tested positive for COVID-19 in mid-April. Although he recovered, he fell ill again in late May. The second time, his illness was more serious , according to the case report.
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Researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, and the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory reported that genetic sequencing of the virus revealed that the patient was infected with a slightly different strain, indicating that it was a true reinfection. .
Re-infection with the coronavirus appears to be rare. This is the first report among the almost six million cases registered so far in the country.
"So far, the evidence suggests that if someone becomes infected, and recovers, they are protected for a period of time," said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Institute for Global Health. "We do not know how long that protection lasts, and surely individual cases will arise in which that does not apply."
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In fact, a case of COVID-19 reinfection was reported in Hong Kong on Monday, the first confirmation of this type of reinfection during the pandemic. This week, two European patients, one in Belgium and one in the Netherlands, were also reported to have been reinfected with the virus.
But, in those cases, the patients either did not get sick the second time around or developed much milder forms of the disease compared to their first infection.
"Hopefully the second time people have symptoms they will be much milder or ideally have no symptoms," Jha said. That's because the immune system should be able to display a stronger response, and the Hong Kong case was "completely consistent with that."
In Nevada's case, however, the man got sicker the second time. When he was first infected, he had the typical symptoms of the coronavirus: headache, cough, sore throat, nausea, and diarrhea. In 10 days, the symptoms disappeared and he tested negative for the virus.
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But a month later, on May 28, he felt ill again, experiencing dizziness and the previous symptoms.
This time, the disease was not cured quickly. Within a week, the oxygen in his blood dropped to dangerously low levels. He needed help breathing and was hospitalized. Once again, the man tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
"That's very concerning," said William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
"If this type of reinfection is common, then we have to worry about how strong the protection we get from vaccines will be ," Schaffner said.
However, if reinfection were common, "we would have already detected it," said Jha, "there are many patients in our country."