Recovered Patients Re-Infected With COVID-19 Were False Alarm, Says South Korea
South Korean team clears that 290 seemingly reinfected patients had in fact returned false positives.
COVID-19 patients who recover have little to no chance of being reinfected by the virus again due to the antibodies developed during the recovery.
This recent shred of good news comes from a South Korean expert panel that has declared the resurgence of coronavirus in humans as improbable.
Reuters
However, were there not cases of such recurrence of the COVID-19 virus in already infected humans? The South Korean team clears that those seemingly reinfected patients had in fact returned false positives.
The panel blames the wrong results on the dead virus fragments left inside the host body till long after the virus is inactive. The reason likely caused more than 290 wrong positives in once infected people in South Korea.
Such (now seemingly false) reports had been observed in countries including South Korea, China and Japan, sometimes weeks after the patient was allowed to leave the hospital.
(Representative Image: Reuters)
Oh Myoung-don, head of the central clinical committee for emerging disease control, explained that fragments of coronavirus can be detected in a human body till up to two months after the virus is dead.
False positive is good news
The false positives are then just a result of inaccurate testing. ¡°The tests detected the ribonucleic acid of the dead virus,¡± said Dr Oh. The technical limitations of the practiced PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests is to be blamed, as it is not able to distinguish whether the virus in a host body is dead or alive, thus leading to false positives at times.
By nature, the SARS-CoV-2 is not a chronic virus, meaning it does not infiltrate the nucleus. ¡°This means it does not cause chronic infection or recurrence,¡± as per Dr Oh.
The finding is probably the most important of the recent developments on the COVID 19 virus. If it is established that once infected hosts develop a noticeable immune response against the virus, the possibility of a second wave of infections in any region can be dumbed down.
In addition to such discoveries, health majors are also trying to develop a full proof cure for the virus. Gilead recently announced positive results during the clinical trials for Remdesivir, famously known as the Ebola drug. You can read all about it here.
