Israeli doctor reinfected with coronavirus 3 months after recovering

The doctor suffered from a fever, cough and muscle pain when she tested positive with the virus in April, but recovered and tested negative for the virus in May and June.

Earlier this month, the doctor came in contact with a confirmed patient and subsequently tested positive for the virus yet again.

This is the second case at Sheba Medical Center in which a patient recovered from the virus and was subsequently reinfected. Another patient at the hospital recovered and returned to the hospital with severe lung inflammation.

The cases are the latest in a series of incidents of suspected reinfection that have raised questions concerning how long immunity against the virus lasts.In May, a 45-year-old woman from Jisr e-Zarka tested positive for the coronavirus after being re-admitted to Hadera’s Hillel Yaffe Medical Center, where she was initially hospitalized with fever and chest pains.
 

This came a month after she was discharged from the medical center having recovered from the virus and testing negative twice. 

Last week, Dr. Maria van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 technical lead, explained that there are a number of studies attempting to figure out how long the protection provided by antibodies will last and that some initial studies have found that they “may wane after a couple of months.” 

With some coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS, people had some form of immunity for about a year or even long, but with other human coronavirus that circulate regularly, the immunity period is much shorter, Kerkhove explained. The WHO official stressed that this is “early data” and more studies are needed.

Preliminary studies in China, Germany, Britain and elsewhere have found that patients infected with the novel coronavirus make protective antibodies as part of their immune system’s defenses, but these appear to last only a few months.

That raises big problems for developers of potential COVID-19 vaccines, experts say – and for public health authorities seeking to deploy them to protect populations from future waves of the pandemic.

To be truly effective, COVID-19 vaccines “will either need to generate stronger and longer lasting protection… or they may need to be given regularly”, he said.

“And those things are not trivial.”