Two European patients are reported to have got re-infected with the coronavirus or COVID-19, as power the regional broadcasters, raising concerns regarding the immunity of people to the virus as the world grapples to fight against the pandemic.
The news comes after a report this week by researchers in Hong Kong involving a man who had been re-infected four and a half months after he was declared recovered.
That has fuelled fears about the effectiveness of potential vaccines against the virus, though experts say there would need to be many more cases of re-infection for these to be justified. Broadcasters said on Tuesday a patient in the Netherlands and another in Belgium had also been re-infected with the virus that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide and crippled the global economy.
COVID-19 Crisis
Dutch broadcaster NOS cited virologist Marion Koopmans as saying the patient in the Netherlands was an older person with a weakened immune system. She said that cases where people have been sick with the virus a long time and it then flares up are better known. But a true re-infection, as in the Dutch, Belgian, and Hong Kong cases, requires genetic testing of the virus in both the first and second infections to see whether the two instances of the virus differ slightly.
Koopmans, an adviser to the Dutch government, said re-infections had been expected. "That someone would pop up with a re-infection, it doesn't make me nervous," she said. "We have to see whether it happens often." Dutch Health Ministry officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst told Belgian broadcaster VRT he had not been surprised by the Hong Kong re-infection. "For us it was not news because we have also had such a case in Belgium," he told the Terzake program. The Belgian case was a woman who had contracted COVID-19 for a first time in the second week of March and for a second time in June.
"I think that in the coming days that we will see other similar stories ... These could be exceptions but do exist and it's not just one," Van Ranst said. "It's not good news." Van Ranst said that in cases such as the Belgian woman's in which the COVID-19 symptoms were relatively mild, the body may not have created enough antibodies to prevent a re-infection, although they might have helped limit the sickness.
(With agency inputs)
