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  • 2020-03-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Can People Who Recover from COVID-19 Become Reinfected? (en)
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  • As the world grappled with the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic in early 2020, people around the globe began to consider the dread possibility that COVID-19 might not only be more infectious and have a much higher mortality rate than the seasonal flu, but that at least some persons who survived it might become reinfected rather than developing an immunity to it. A few reports have trickled in from around the world suggesting that someone who had COVID-19 recovered and then fell ill with it again, such as the following account from China: However, at this juncture it's difficult to determine whether such reports document that fully recovered COVID-19 patients truly became infected anew, or whether those persons may have relapsed or not completely recovered from their first bout of the illness. Problems with diagnostic testing techniques have been raised as one possibility to explain why some patients might have retested positive for COVID-19 after seemingly recovering: The Los Angeles Times quoted Dr. Keiji Fukuda, director of Hong Kong University’s School of Public Health, as saying that COVID-19 reinfection was unlikely and that false positives in testing procedures were a more likely possibility: Dr. Clifford Lane, deputy director for Clinical Research and Special Projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was also quoted as suggesting that the real issue was with inaccuracies in testing patients who had not fully recovered rather than with reinfection: A coronavirus infection's going into a dormant stage and then re-emerging was another possibility for explaining the appearance of reinfection suggested by Dr. Philip M. Tierno, Clinical Professor of Microbiology and Pathology at at New York University: Once you have the infection, it could remain dormant with minimal symptoms. And then you can get an exacerbation if it finds its way into the lungs. The Associated Press also offered the possibility that mutations in the virus might conceivably make it different enough to reinfect persons who had acquired immunity to an earlier version: Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is for many Americans the most familiar source for information on the coronavirus disease (due to his numerous appearances at government press conferences and cable television news reports), told Congress that he felt it was unlikely anyone could become reinfected by the virus: We haven’t formally proved it, but ... if this acts like any other virus, once you recover, you won’t get reinfected. While this topic is an area that requires additional study, medical professionals still caution that The things to worry about are at the other end of the illness -- that the primary focus should still be on limiting the outbreak by trying to ensure that symptomatic and undiagnosed persons are not exposing themselves to, and potentially infecting, others. (en)
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