89-yr-old Dutch woman 1st known person to die from contracting COVID-19 twice

Maastricht: An 89-year-old woman in the Netherlands has become the first recorded person to die after being reinfected with COVID-19.

The woman, the Daily Mail reports, was undergoing treatment for cancer at the time, and had been infected with two “genetically different” COVID-19 strains in a spell of two months. However, she had not tested negative in between her two positive tests, so it remains unclear whether she caught the virus anew, or whether the second infection was a resurgence of the initial illness.

She tested positive when she first went to hospital and showed a fever and bad cough, before getting better and being discharged five days later. However, 59 days after that she was back at hospital with similar symptoms. After testing positive once more, the Mail reports, she died within three weeks.

The news comes as the first study to investigate the case of a person in the U.S. who contracted Covid-19 twice found reinfection can occur swiftly and the second bout of illness can be more severe.

The report was published just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump, who was infected with COVID-19 and hospitalized earlier this month, said he believes he now has immunity and felt “so powerful.”

The research, published in the Lancet medical journal, examined the case of a 25-year-old man living in Nevada who became infected with two different genetic variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in less than two months. He tested negative twice in between, meaning he’s unlikely to have suffered a single prolonged infection.

Any new findings on resistance may have implications for a vaccine as drugmakers race toward the finish line, experts say; the degree of protective immunity after a Covid-19 infection is one of the pandemic’s great unknowns.

So far a handful of reinfection cases have been recorded since the start of the outbreak late last year. One patient in Ecuador also suffered a worse bout of illness the second time around. It’s also possible people with no symptoms could be infected multiple times without knowing it.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that reinfections are possible, but we can’t yet know how common this will be,” said Simon Clarke, a microbiology expert at Britain’s Reading University.

“If people can be reinfected easily, it could also have implications for vaccination programs as well as our understanding of when and how the pandemic will end.”

The Nevada man first tested positive for the virus mid-April after experiencing a headache, coughing, nausea and diarrhea. He had no underlying conditions that could’ve worsened his illness. He isolated and got better by the end of the month.

Oxygen needed

At the end of May, though, the man consulted at an urgent care centre with fever and dizziness in addition to the symptoms he’d experienced the prior month. Five days later he was hospitalized with shortness of breath and given oxygen before testing positive for Covid-19 once more.

Scientists sequenced the genomes of the patient’s virus samples and found significant differences, suggesting the man was infected by two distinct versions of the coronavirus.

The researchers said they couldn’t be sure why the second infection was worse. It’s possible the patient was exposed to a higher dose of virus the second time, that the version he encountered was more virulent or even that the presence of antibodies from the first infection was to blame in a twist observed with another coronavirus. It’s even possible — but unlikely — that there was a continuous infection with some sort of deactivation-reactivation dynamic, they wrote.

“There are still many unknowns,” said Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory and lead author of the study. “Our findings signal that a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection may not necessarily protect against future infection. The possibility of reinfections could have significant implications for our understanding of Covid-19 immunity, especially in the absence of an effective vaccine.”

“These findings reinforce the point that we still do not know enough about the immune response to this infection,” said Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

Brendan Wren, a professor of vaccinology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said the Nevada case was the fifth confirmed example of reinfection worldwide.

“The demonstration that it is possible to be reinfected by SARS-CoV-2 may suggest that a COVID-19 vaccine may not be totally protective,” he said. “However, given the (more than) 40 million cases worldwide, these small examples of reinfection are tiny and should not deter efforts to develop vaccines.”