JN / Agencies
Today at 14:10–
The Netherlands recorded the first death in the world of a person infected for the second time by SARS-CoV-2: an 89-year-old woman, who also suffered from a rare form of bone marrow cancer.
According to the explanations given, this Tuesday, by the Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, the patient needed to be hospitalized in the first wave of the pandemic of the new coronavirus, after developing symptoms such as high fever and strong cough, but she was discharged after five days and tested negative on two exams after the symptoms disappear.
The Dutch patient also suffered from a disease known as Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia, a rare form of bone marrow cancer, so her immune system had been affected for months.
Two months after overcoming covid-19, the woman started new chemotherapy sessions, but started to have fever, cough and severe shortness of breath just two days after starting treatment, so she was readmitted to the hospital.
The patient was tested for the new coronavirus (PCR), which was positive, but tested negative in two serological tests that were done to detect whether he still had antibodies to the virus in his blood, after the first time it was infected.
Eight days after being admitted, the patient’s health deteriorated dramatically and died within two weeks.
“He certainly died of covid-19, but he was also very sick,” said Koopmans, who is taking part in an investigation into reinfection carried out by the University of Oxford.
The Dutch virologist pointed out that there are about 25 known cases of reinfection worldwide and in most cases, less severe symptoms developed than during the first infection.
Thus, scientists assume that reinfections are still “exceptions”, although Koopmans believes that “there will be more”.
For the virologist, “an important question is whether this is something typical of covid-19”, because in many cases the second infection occurred just two months after the first infection.
Although the researcher expects that most people who have overcome their first infection with the new coronavirus are now protected “for a longer time”, Koopmans acknowledged that in any case, “it won’t last a lifetime, because it never happened with any respiratory virus. “.
It is not yet clear what knowledge of these specific cases could mean for the development of a covid-19 vaccine, nor to what extent the immune system learns enough during the first infection with the new coronavirus, but antibodies produced naturally after an initial contagion seem to disappear relatively quickly in certain cases.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed more than one million and seventy-seven thousand deaths and more than 37.5 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report made by the French agency AFP.
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