{"id":4772,"date":"2020-08-25T14:08:05","date_gmt":"2020-08-25T07:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illume-emag.com\/?p=4772"},"modified":"2020-08-25T14:09:06","modified_gmt":"2020-08-25T07:09:06","slug":"hong-kong-researchers-report-first-documented-coronavirus-re-infection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/hong-kong-researchers-report-first-documented-coronavirus-re-infection\/","title":{"rendered":"Hong Kong researchers report first documented coronavirus re-infection"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A man wearing a protective face mask takes a photo of the sunset at Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront as skyline buildings stand across Victoria Harbor following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Hong Kong, China July 28, 2020. Photo: Reuters<\/em><\/p>\n

The findings indicate the disease, which has killed more than 800,000 people worldwide, may continue to spread amongst the global population despite herd immunity, they said.<\/p>\n

The 33-year-old male was cleared of COVID-19 and discharged from a hospital in April, but tested positive again after returning from Spain via Britain on Aug. 15.<\/p>\n

The patient had appeared to be previously healthy, researchers said in the paper, which was accepted by the international medical journal\u00a0Clinical Infectious Diseases.<\/p>\n

He was found to have contracted a different coronavirus strain from the one he had previously contracted and remained asymptomatic for the second infection.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe finding does not mean taking vaccines will be useless,\u201d Dr. Kai-Wang To, one of the leading authors of the paper, told\u00a0Reuters<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cImmunity induced by vaccination can be different from those induced by natural infection,\u201d To said.<\/p>\n

\u201c[We] will need to wait for the results of the vaccine trials to see if how effective vaccines are.\u201d<\/p>\n

World Health Organization (WHO) epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said on Monday that there was no need to jump to any conclusions in response to the Hong Kong case.<\/p>\n

Instances of people discharged from hospitals and testing positive again for COVID-19 infection have been reported in mainland China.<\/p>\n

However, in those cases it was not clear whether they had contracted the virus again after full recovery – as happened to the Hong Kong patient – or still had the virus in their body from the initial infection.<\/p>\n

The preliminary number of patients in China who tested positive again once being discharged from hospital was 5%-15%, Wang Guiqiang, an infectious disease specialist in China\u2019s expert group for COVID-19 treatment, said during a press briefing in May.<\/p>\n

One explanation was that the virus still existed in the lungs of patients but was not detected in samples taken from upper parts of the respiratory tract, he said.<\/p>\n

Other possible causes were low sensitivity of tests and weak immunity that could lead to persistent positive results, he added.<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Barrett, an expert and consultant with the COVID-19 Genome Project at Britain\u2019s Wellcome Sanger Institute, said in emailed comments to\u00a0Reuters<\/em>\u00a0that it was very hard to make any strong inference from a single observation.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven the number of global infections to date, seeing one case of re-infection is not that surprising even if it is a very rare occurrence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A man wearing a protective face mask takes a photo of the sunset at Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront as skyline buildings stand across Victoria Harbor following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Hong Kong, China July 28, 2020. Photo: Reuters The findings indicate the disease, which has killed more than 800,000 people worldwide, may continue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4773,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[761],"tags":[1087,1123,2490,2440,2488,1566],"class_list":{"0":"post-4772","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrity-buzz","8":"tag-coronavirus","9":"tag-covid-19","10":"tag-illume-en","11":"tag-illume-emag-en","12":"tag-illume-magazine","13":"tag-ncov-en"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavyon.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}