Ross Clark Ross Clark

The curious case of the man who caught Covid twice

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Does catching the SARS-CoV-2 virus give us immunity from further infection by the virus or can we catch it a second time? The question has been given extra poignancy this week following Donald Trump’s tweet on Sunday, quickly censured by Twitter, claiming that he was immune. Before that row has had a chance to die down, a paper emerges in the Lancet Infectious Diseases reporting the possible reinfection of a 25-year-old man in Washoe County, Nevada.

The timeline reported in the paper, by the university of Nevada, is as follows. The patient first developed symptoms – sore throat, cough, headache, nausea, diarrhoea – on 25 March. He tested positive for the virus at a community testing facility on 18 April. By 27 April, his symptoms had disappeared. He then tested negative on 9 May and 26 May. On 28 May, however, he began to develop further symptoms: fever, headache, dizziness, cough, nausea and diarrhoea. This time his symptoms were more severe, and he was hospitalised. He was tested again on 5 and 6 June, and tested positive. He has since recovered.

The university of Nevada team says it has used genetic sequencing and two different testing methodologies to prove that the virus really was present on two occasions, and that it used fragment analysis to prove that the samples – obtained via nasal swabs – really did come from the same patient. So is the assumption that exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus gains us at least short-term immunity wrong? That would have huge implications because if we can’t gain immunity it would render the multi-billion pound efforts to develop a vaccine pretty well useless. It would also undermine an awful lot of modelling on the virus, including, for example, the Imperial College paper of 16 March, which assumed that people who had had the virus were no longer susceptible.

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