COVID-19 Reinfection Confirmed

Many of us have been waiting anxiously for updates on the COVID-19 battlefront, but the news has been uncertain at best. We’re still only slightly closer to finding herd immunity than we were months ago, and though treatment has improved, slowing the death rate, the infection rate has not likewise dropped off. And recently, scientists have confirmed that reinfection may be possible under some circumstances, though they're still working out what that may mean, exactly. Here's the latest.

First Confirmed Reinfection of COVID-19 in the US

The New York Times recently reported some time ago about a man in Hong Kong who’d caught COVID-19 roughly 4 months after he’d first recovered from it. Some authorities have expressed doubt over our ability to build a lasting defense against this virus, but the evidence has been scarce. At the time of the Hong Kong report, only two other confirmed cases of reinfections had existed.

Now, according to an article preprint set for publication in The Lancet, doctors have added a 25-year-old Nevada resident to that list. RNA tests on the man’s two infections, which occurred 48 days apart from one another, showed they were two distinct mutations, ruling out the possibility of a lasting or reemerging illness in this case. While mutations can occur at any time, the researchers who analyzed the two samples found their differences were too great to have come from the same infection. For the math to add up, the virus would have had to mutate more than 3.6 times faster than normal so it's believed that the man caught the infection in two separate incidents.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of COVID-19 Reinfection

All of this new information could help give us a better idea of what we’re up against, and it could mean both good and bad news. The most positive is that three of the four documented reinfection cases have been asymptomatic. This means it’s likely that the majority of us have immune systems strong enough to keep us from experiencing symptoms twice within a certain time frame, so reinfection shouldn’t be a concern for most people.

The patient in Nevada wasn’t so lucky. During his first bout with COVID-19, he complained of a cough, headache, sore throat and lower gastrointestinal symptoms, but he was still able to recover on his own. However, when he fell ill again, he ended up in the hospital and on supportive oxygen. He didn’t have any comorbid conditions, such as HIV, compromising his system, so why would he get mildly sick once and critically ill the second time?

Research has shown certain coronavirus antibodies can cross-react with one another in dangerous ways, causing serious immune responses in some unlucky patients. Other studies have found people may receive protection from recent infections with other coronaviruses, including the ones that cause the common cold. Experts are still trying to figure out why reactions can vary so greatly.

We may need to ask:

• Could some mutations of COVID-19 be harder to fight off than others?
• Might multiple infections safeguard most people while also being more dangerous to a rare few?
• What is the role of viral load?

COVID-19 has guarded its mysteries well but we're getting closer all the time and we're probably nearing the other side. It’s possible that previous infections are a key to the high rate of asymptomatic infections we’ve seen, but a new theory in the New England Journal of Medicine says it may be more related to viral load at the time of exposure. Either way, the possibility of reinfection is looking very real so even if you've had it once, it's best to keep masking up until we get a real cure or solid prevention in place. Luckily, we have a lot of great minds working hard to get to the bottom of it.

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