The only other documented infections known about are a 33-year-old Hong Kong man who was found to be reinfected on August 24, and a A 25-year-old Nevada man who became the first documented case of Covid-19 reinfection in the United States, and the second case in the world on August 29.
Researchers at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle are investigating the case in hopes of learning what this reinfection can tell scientists about how long immunity lasts, and how effective a vaccine might be, according to KIRO7.com.
The Seattle patient is in his 60s and was living in a nursing home when he was hospitalized four months ago with COVID-19. He recently developed mild symptoms of the disease, said Dr. Jason Goldman, who leads the COVID Research Team at Swedish Medical Center. He added that this is encouraging news.
“We don’t know how much immunity levels we need to be protected,” Dr. Goldman said. “Most of the reported cases are more mild the second time around,” he said. “So even if the immune system has failed to prevent a second infection, it does seem to be limiting the severity the second time around.”
The question that needs to be answered is if the antibodies your body develops during an initial infection will work to make a second exposure easier. “In the vast majority of patients who have gotten infected with COVID, they have recovered and not been re-infected, so that’s the second reassuring finding.”
Goldman and his colleagues published their study on the preprint MedRXiv website. so it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. In the study, the researchers sequenced the viruses from two distinct episodes of symptomatic COVID-19 separated by 144 days in the patient. They were able to conclusively describe reinfection with a new strain harboring the spike variant D614G.
