One unpleasant lesson that the medical community learned about COVID-19 is that you can get infected with the disease twice. One recent proof comes from an Israeli patient who got reinfected with COVID in January, and this time it’s the South African variant that he has to deal with. Although the man beat COVID back in August 2020, he’s now in serious condition, according to The Jerusalem Post.
The unlucky patient is 58 years old, and he also has a history of asthma. During his first COVID infection, the man dealt with mild fever and shortness of breath. He recovered in only a few days and tested negative twice afterwards.
Intubated a week after coming to the hospital
Thanks to genome sequencing, it was found that the Israeli person suffers from the South African strain of COVID-19. A week after getting hospitalized due to recurrent shortness of breath and fever and testing positive for COVID once again, the patient developed severe acute respiratory distress syndrome and was intubated and put on a ventilator.
Once again, we all have to realize that reinfection with COVID is entirely possible, and there were reports of people getting reinfected even if they had antibodies against the virus. Some cases of reinfections caused more severe illness, while others didn’t.
As The Guardian reveals, one study from Public Health England (PHE) claims that the median time between the first and second infection with COVID was about five months. The same source says that a study from Qatar suggests that protection by natural immunity grants an efficacy of about 95% and it lasts for about seven months.
Otherwise, the COVID-19 pandemic is slowing down in the last several days. There is a total of over 109.2 million cases of infections with the coronavirus and more than 2.4 million deaths caused by it, according to worldometers.info.
