COVID-19 reinfection reported in Nevada patient, researchers say
A Nevada man appears to be the nation's first confirmed case of COVID-19 reinfection, researchers say.
The case is detailed in an online preprint, a study that has not yet been peer reviewed before officially being published.
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The case involves a 25-year-old man living in Reno, Nevada, who first tested positive for COVID-19 in mid-April. He recovered, but got sick again in late May. The second time around, his illness was more severe, the case report said.
First documented case of COVID reinfection raises new concerns about virus
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Researchers reported that genetic sequencing of the virus revealed that he had been infected with a slightly different strain, indicating a true reinfection.
It's still unclear why the patient was reinfected. The cause could lie in his immune system, the virus itself, or a combination of the two.
Mark Pandori, director the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory and one of the authors of the report, stressed that reinfection with the coronavirus appears to be rare. This is the first instance reported in the U.S. among the nation's nearly 6 million cases so far, and "may not be generalizable" to the public, Pandori said.
Still, he urged caution. "If you've had it, you can't necessarily be considered invulnerable to the infection" again, said Pandori, who is also an associate professor of pathology and lab medicine at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.
"The evidence so far suggests that if you've been infected and recovered, then you're protected for some period of time," Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said. "We don't know how long, and we're going to find individual cases of people for whom that's not true."
Indeed, on Monday, a case of COVID-19 reinfection was reported in Hong Kong -- the first such confirmation of reinfection during the pandemic. Two European patients, one in Belgium and one in the Netherlands, were also reported this week to have been reinfected with the virus.
But in those instances, the patients did not get sick the second time around, or they developed much milder forms of the illness than their first infection.
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