About Fifty-one
persons in South Korea have reportedly tested positive again for COVID-19 after
they had recovered and been discharged from quarantine.
The patients, from
the city of Daegu, were said to have been placed in quarantine after being diagnosed with the
virus. Days after being released from quarantine they then tested positive.
Xinhua, China’s
official state-run press agency, quoted Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (KCDC) on Monday, as saying that the virus was likely “reactivated”,
rather than patients becoming re-infected.
As a result of this,
the KCDC has concluded plans to send a team of investigators to Daegu, the
country’s worst hit region, to conduct an epidemiological investigation into the
cases.
The development also
goes in contradiction with current studies on how the virus works with Paul
Hunter, an infectious diseases professor at the University of East Anglia,
dismissing the claim.
Hunter told Daily
Mail that the explanation lacks any evidence and attributed a second positive
result to a previous wrong result that happens in one out of five tests due to
unreliability of swab samples.
“I agree that these
will not be reinfections but I do not think these will be reactivations.
Personally, I think the most likely explanation is that the clearance samples
were false negative. It does appear that swabs for the virus are not 100 per
cent reliable,” he said.
In his part, Mark
Harris, a virology professor at University of Leeds, said that more reinfection
calls for concern but ultimately agreed that a reactivation is unlikely due to
presence of immunity already built up by the body system towards the virus.
“The reports that
patients who tested negative subsequently tested positive again is clearly of
concern. It is unlikely that they would have been re-infected having cleared
the virus, as they would most likely have mounted an immune response to the
virus that would prevent such reinfection,” he said.
“The other
possibility therefore is that they did not in fact clear the infection but
remained persistently infected.”
Japan had recorded
first known case of a person being re-diagnosed with COVID-19 in February. The
patient was said to have tested positive on February 26 after a negative result
on February 6.
Masaya Yamato,
director of Rinku General Medical Center’s infectious diseases center in Japan
had rejected the possibility of reinfection in individuals who recovered fully
after showing symptoms.
He claimed that
individuals who went through full course of the disease would have fully
developed antibodies.
“A recovery [of
asymptomatic positive patients] doesn’t mean the virus is gone— it is dormant.
A patient who contracts the virus needs about 14 days, or longer in some
patients like the elderly, to produce the antibodies,” Yamato said.
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