3rd U.S. case of confirmed COVID reinfection
SEATTLE — The Seattle-area nursing home resident first tested positive for the novel coronavirus in early March. He spent more than 40 days in the hospital with fever, pneumonia and difficulty breathing before testing negative multiple times and being discharged.
Then, nearly five months later, he got sick again with COVID-19.
Now, genetic testing by a team of Seattle physicians and scientists has revealed that sexagenarian’s second bout of the illness caused by the coronavirus in July wasn’t a relapse but a new infection with a slightly different variant of the virus that spread in the U.S. from Europe.
The patient is only the third person in the United States — and one of about 20worldwide — confirmed to have experienced such a double whammy.
Since posting a preprint in late
September describing their findings, which have not been peerreviewed, the Seattle team has confirmed one additional local reinfection and is examining other possible cases, said Dr. Jason Goldman, an infectious-disease specialist at Swedishmedicalcenter.
“It’s not unexpected this would occur, because we know immunity wanes to other respiratory infections, like flu,” Goldman said. “But I was a little surprised to find it in my own hospital.”
The local patient wasn’t as sick the second time around and has since recovered, Goldman
In laboratory tests, the antibodies the patient eventually produced after his second infection were somewhat more effective at neutralizing the European variant than the first strain.
But the difference isn’t big enough to raise concerns about vaccines based on the original strain or to suggest that the shift in viral strains was responsible for the patient’s reinfection, said Dr. Bill Messer, an infectious-disease physician and virologist at Oregon Health & Science University who was not involved in the analysis.
“This isn’t a case of the second virus escaping the immune response to the first virus,” Messer said.
What’s more likely is that the patient failed to develop a robust and lasting immune response to the first infection, and so fell prey again, Messer said.
Some documented reinfections have occurred in people with compromised immune systems, like the Dutch woman who died. The Seattle-area patient also suffers from emphysema and was treated with steroids, which can dampenimmune response, Messer pointed out.
“There’s probably something about this patient’s immune system that isn’t really functioning well,” Goldman agreed.
It’s impossible to draw many conclusions fromsingle case studies like this one, Goldman stressed.
He expects to see more reinfections in the coming months, as transmission rates rise during the fall and winter and more people who recovered from earlier infections are exposed again.
“Our experience has been that once we start looking for it, we find it,” Goldman said.