It is feared that the case of reinfection will make the Covid-19 vaccine insufficient to protect.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, LONDON – The United States reported the first case finding reinfeksi aka recurring infections Covid-19 to its citizens. The case of a man who was twice infected with Covid-19 shows that there is still much to learn about the immune response and also raises questions about vaccinations.
The 25-year-old man from Reno, Nevada, tested positive in April after showing mild symptoms. He then fell ill again in late May with a more serious attack, according to a case report in a medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The report was published just hours after US President Donald Trump said he believed he now had immunity and felt very strong. Trump admitted to being infected with Covid-19 and was briefly treated in a military hospital in early October.
Scientists say that while known incidents of reinfection appear rare and the Nevada man has now recovered, such cases are worrying. Other isolated cases of reinfection have been reported worldwide, including in Asia and Europe.
In the Netherlands, the National Institute for Public Health confirmed on Tuesday (13/10) that a grandmother, 89 years old and suffering from rare bone marrow cancer, recently died after contracting Covid-19 for the second time. Dutch media say this is the first known case of death worldwide following the reinfection of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that reinfection is possible, but we do not yet know how common this will be,” said Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at the UK University of Reading. Reuters, Wednesday (14/10).
If people could get re-infected easily, Clarke said, that could also have an impact on vaccination programs. Our understanding of when and how the pandemic will end is also changing.
The Nevada patient doctor, who first reported the case in a peer-reviewed paper in August, said that sophisticated testing showed the strains of virus associated with each bout of infection were genetically different.
“These findings reinforce the point that we still don’t know enough about the immune response to this infection,” said Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the British University in East Anglia.
Brendan Wren, a professor of vaccinology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said the Nevada case was the fifth confirmed example of reinfection worldwide. According to him, the findings regarding the possibility of being reinfected by SARS-CoV-2 indicate that the Covid-19 vaccine may not fully protect.
“However, given (more than) 40 million cases worldwide, this tiny sample of reinfection is small and should not hinder efforts to develop a vaccine,” Wren said.
World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman Tarik Jasarevic agreed that the reinfection case in the US underscored what is not known about immunity.
“And this is also an argument against what some have supported, about building herd immunity naturally. Because we don’t know about that,” he said.
source: Reuters
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