This Nevada 25-year-old is the 4th patient who has been documented to have recovered from COVID-19, tested negative for it, and then have been reinfected with a second case of COVID-19 caused by a strain with a slightly different genetic signature than that of the strain he was first infected with (the others were in Hong Kong, Belgium, and the Netherlands).
From ABC News:
In late March, he developed some of the classic signs of COVID-19: sore throat, cough, diarrhea, headache and nausea. After testing positive on April 18, he began to gradually feel better, and the virus appeared to leave his system, seemingly verified with two consecutive negative tests in May.
But only a few weeks later, he started to feel ill again, testing positive for COVID-19 once again in June. This time, he was admitted to the hospital with serious symptoms.
At first, the researchers wondered if the virus had been hiding in his body the whole time -- mutating, changing and eventually developing into something that caused him to get sick with COVID-19 a second time. But they ultimately rejected this theory, saying that the two viruses were so different that it would have been nearly impossible for the virus to change that quickly inside his body. The only explanation was that he had been infected by a slightly different version of the coronavirus.
Doctors have long reported seeing patients infected with COVID-19 recover and test negative for the virus multiple times, only to test positive for the virus months later. In March 2020, about 5%-10% of COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China quarantine facilities recovered, tested negative, and then were reinfected and tested positive again. A study of recovered COVID-19 patients in Shenzhen, China found that 38 out of 262, or almost 15% of the patients, tested positive after they were discharged. Because none of these reinfected patients had their virus samples genetically tested to see if the second infection came from strain different from the strain that caused the first infection (and it was probably too early in the pandemic for multiple strains to emerge and affect the same patients anyway), these reports were dismissed as documenting cases where the patient just had very long bouts of COVID-19, with some false negative test results in the middle of them, rather than having been reinfected.
Genetic testing of virus strains is still rare, but now that they are finding that the same patients are getting reinfected with new strains of COVID-19, the evidence is piling up that people can get reinfected with COVID-19 within a few weeks or months after recovering from it. So there are probably a lot more COVID-19 patients whose reinfections have not been documented because everyone assumed that they just had one multi-month bout of the same infection with false negative tests in the middle.
Early in the pandemic, most were probably reinfected with the same strain of COVID-19 they first caught. Even if scientists had compared the genetic signature of the initial infection with that of the reinfection back then, they probably wouldn’t have found reinfection with new strains, since the virus mutates slowly, the virus didn’t get so many chances to mutate in the earliest outbreaks which infected merely hundreds of thousands rather than the (at least) 25,002,652 cases that have now been documented, and most recovered patients kept living in the same community where they first caught the disease rather than going somewhere else where a new strain might be circulating. Even in cases where recovered patients are infected with new strains of COVID-19, in most situations no one will bother to test for differences between the first strain they were infected with and the second strain they were infected with—these slight differences in strains are not picked up by routing testing processes, which there still aren’t enough of anyway.
Welcome to the new normal. This makes it look increasingly likely that we will all have to get vaccinated every month or so and continue some level of social distancing, even after a vaccine is developed. We’ll need a much bigger healthcare system and universal healthcare to give everyone a vaccine every month.
