At NPR Emily Feng presents some accounts of people in Wuhan who were pronounced recovered from COVID-19 who reportedly have it again:
NPR has spoken by phone or exchanged text messages with four individuals in Wuhan who are part of this group of individuals testing positive a second time in March. All four said they had been sickened with the virus and tested positive, then were released from medical care in recent weeks after their condition improved and they tested negative.
Two of them are front-line doctors who were sickened after treating patients in their Wuhan hospitals. The other two are Wuhan residents. They all requested anonymity when speaking with NPR because those who have challenged the government’s handling of the outbreak have been detained.
One of the Wuhan residents who spoke to NPR exhibited severe symptoms during their first round of illness and was eventually hospitalized. The second resident displayed only mild symptoms at first and was quarantined in one of more than a dozen makeshift treatment centers erected in Wuhan during the peak of the outbreak.
But when both were tested a second time for the coronavirus on Sunday, March 22, as a precondition for seeking medical care for unrelated health issues, they tested positive for the coronavirus even though they exhibited none of the typical symptoms, such as a fever or dry cough. The time from their recovery and release to the retest ranged from a few days to a few weeks.
Read the whole thing.
We don’t know whether these were the results of false negatives, false positives, some combination, or something else. Take it for what it’s worth.
Basically, I don’t believe any reports coming out of China these days but if individuals who’ve had COVID-19 don’t gain immunity it’s pretty much a worst case scenario.
There are apparently at least eight strains of the beast running around there. Some of the measures taken seem to have had an affect on their spread. Below is from USA today.
https://news.yahoo.com/8-strains-coronavirus-circling-globe-182338255.html
They say things are never so bad they can’t get worse:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southasia/modi-seeks-forgiveness-from-indias-poor-over-coronavirus-lockdown-idUSKBN21G0AU
That’s an interesting site (“8 strains”), TarsTarkas. Unless resistance to all of the emergent strains is conferred by the same hypothetical vaccine, it depicts graphically why complete eradication may be beyond our present abilities.
Here is a vologists take on re-infections:
“1) The patients have likely indeed recovered from their covid infection and are on their way to clearing the virus as their immune system hunts down every infected cell and stray virion. But there are still lingering bits and pieces of the virus around.
“2) these tests can be very sensitive at detecting viral genetic material, even it’s just a non-infectious byproduct of the immune system conquering the virus.
“3) but it’s also sometimes the case that the test yields a false negative result; maybe the swab didn’t pick up enough material or was mishandled, so the next retest turning up positive could be catching the original infection, not a new one.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterKolchinsky/status/1244029896453754880
Yikes, virologist
If a universal vaccine cannot be made, we may see HCQ (or its replacement) become a prophylactic treatment for years.