A SECOND INFECTION
She already had a mild case in late September and didn’t think she could get it again— until she did
Musician gets sick with COVID-19 a second time, a rare occurrence that appears to be rising.
Melissa Ragsdale, 41, was onstage the Saturday night after New Year’s, fronting a high-energy pop band, when her head began pounding. She took an Imitrex; usually one was enough to squelch a migraine. But this time the pill didn’t work, so she took a second one. And even that didn’t make a dent in the pain.
Sunday morning, she couldn’t get out of bed. Her headache wouldn’t go away, and now she ached all over. She could barely lift a protein shake to her mouth.
It couldn’t be COVID-19, she thought. She’d already had that.
But it was.
The first round
The first time around hadn’t felt like that. That time, fatigue and sluggishness alone were enough for Ragsdale, an energetic fitness buff, to suspect something was off. But still, she was surprised when her Sept. 25 COVID-19 test came back positive.
That time her energy returned fast. After that first sluggish day, she was immediately able to work out again.
For months later, though, she had flashes of mental strangeness. For a long few seconds, at Target or the grocery store, she’d suddenly not know where she was. Or she’d find herself at a stoplight with no idea where she was going or which way to turn.
“COVID brain,” people call it: one of the the neurological side effects Ragsdale read up on.
At least, she thought, having had COVID meant that she wouldn’t get it again.
But after that January gig, there she was, sick as a dog.
Like a lot of musicians, she doesn’t have insurance, so she didn’t want to go to a hospital ER. She drove herself to a city rapid-testing site, lying down in the car to rest while she waited in line.
After 15 minutes, the test revealed that she had antibodies. Twelve hours later, she found out that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was active in her body.
Which is to say: She had COVID again.
Reported but ‘rare’
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official statement, cases of CO
VID-19 reinfection “have been reported but remain rare.” But along with firsttime COVID infections, they appear to be on the rise.
Ragsdale’s case is not one of the more than two dozen that, so far, have been officially documented in scientific journals, involving patients from around the world: in Hong Kong, Belgium, Ecuador, Nevada. Sometimes those patients’ second cases have been milder; sometimes they’re more severe.
To be described in an official journal, a reinfection case has high bars to clear. The patient has to have had two positive PCR tests, with at least one symptom-free month in between. Besides that, most journals require that genomic sequencing has to show two different strains of the virus. The idea is to guarantee that the patient’s second bout is truly a separate infection, and not just the result of, say, virus hiding out in the gut until it’s able to resurge.
Very few labs, though, can sequence a genome. So in many countries, scientists are tracking many more suspected cases of reinfection than would qualify for those journals. In Mexico, for instance, scientists were tracking 258 suspected cases as of midOctober. Sweden, in November, was monitoring 150.
Some scientists worry that COVID immunity — either from a vaccine or from having the disease — may drop off after time. A team led by Amsterdam virologist Lia van der Hoek recently showed that reinfections with the coronaviruses that cause the common cold occur after an average of 12 months, and Van der Hoek warns that COVID-19 might follow the same pattern — meaning that a worldwide wave of second infections might only now be starting to gain steam.
On Thursday, Ragsdale’s awful headache and joint aches were gone, but new symptoms had emerged. She was coughing. She had no appetite. And her senses of taste and smell were weirdly spotty: She could smell the vanilla in her vanilla-lavender candle, but not the lavender.
She’d contacted everyone she remembered being near that she might have infected them — her bandmates, her ex, her mom and grandma — and was relieved that so far, none had gotten sick.
Now, she said, she wants to warn other people who’d had COVID not to assume that they’re immune.
“Don’t let your guard down,” she said. “Don’t assume that, just because you got it once before, you won’t get it again.”