Virus infection creates immunity for at least six months: Study
German police opened a murder inquiry into a doctor over the killing of two seriously ill coronavirus patients with a lethal injection
Individuals infected with coronavirus are unlikely to catch the illness again for at least six months, researchers at the University of Oxford said on Friday.
The finding comes as part of a large-scale study into Covid-19 reinfection ater observations from healthcare professionals that the phenomenon was relatively rare.
Oxford University Professor David Eyre, one of the authors of the study, called the findings “really good news”.
“We can be confident that, at least in the short term, most people who get Covid-19 won’t get it again,” he said.
The authors highlighted they had not yet gathered enough data to make a judgement on reinfection ater six months.
However, the ongoing study has an end goal of verifying how long protection from reinfection lasts in total.
The director of infection prevention and control at study partners Oxford University Hospitals ( OUH), Katie Jeffery, called the finding “exciting”.
It indicated “that infection with the virus provides at least short-term protection from re-infection”, she added.
US biotech firm Moderna announced this week its vaccine candidate was nearly 95 percent effective in a trial — a week ater similar results were announced by pharma giant Pfizer and its German partner Biontech.
The World Health Organization (WHO) welcomed the study saying the findings extended its understanding of coronavirus protection.
“We really commend the researchers for doing those studies,” WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan told reporters in Geneva, explaining the findings had delivered the “best data”.
Ryan added the antibody response detailed in the research gave “hope for longer periods of protection” from vaccine candidates.
The Oxford study into reinfection drew on data from regular coronavirus testing of 12,180 health care workers at OUH over a period of 30 weeks.
It found that none of the 1,246 staff with coronavirus antibodies developed a symptomatic infection. Three members of staff with antibodies did test positive for the virus that causes Covid-19 but were all well and did not develop symptoms.
The WHO said it is working with 50 countries where studies on antibody responses in different groups, such as in the general population or among healthcare workers, were taking place.
The UN health body said it was pooling those results to give a broader picture of how the pandemic was developing.
On the other hand, German police said they had opened a murder inquiry against a senior doctor in the western city of Essen over the killing of two seriously ill coronavirus patients with a lethal injection, authorities.
The doctor, 44, who had been working at the University Hospital in Essen since February, is suspected of having killed two men, aged 47 and 50, who were in intensive care with very severe cases of the disease, Essen police said on Friday.
They said the man, who was arrested on Wednesday, had confessed to one of the killings, saying that he had wanted to spare the patient and his relatives further suffering.
The Bild daily reported that the doctor had informed the patients’ families before killing them with a lethal injection.
Ill patients can request help in ending their lives in Germany under a court ruling issued last year, but it was unclear if this had happened in the doctor’s case.
All forms of assisted death are particularly sensitive in Germany due to the legacy of the Holocaust, when the Nazi regime killed six million Jews and carried out inhumane experiments on a number of them.
The Essen hospital said the doctor had been suspended and that it was helping police with their inquiries.
The western industrial region of which Essen is part of is experiencing one of Germany’s most severe outbreaks of the pandemic, with 166 cases diagnosed per 100,000 population over the past week, far above the government’s target of 50.