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Two European sufferers are verified to have been re-infected with the coronavirus, raising concerns about people’s immunity to the virus since the world struggles to tame the pandemic.
The cases, in Belgium and the Netherlands, follow a report this week by researchers at Hong Kong to a guy there who was re-infected using a different strain of the virus four and a half months after being declared recovered – the first such re-infection to be documented.
That has fuelled fears about the effectiveness of potential vaccines against the virus, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, though experts say there would need to be many more cases of re-infection for them to be justified.
Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst said the Belgian case was a woman who’d contracted COVID-19 for the first time in March and then again using a different coronavirus strain in June. Further instances of re-infection were going to surface, he explained.
Van Ranst told Reuters TV the woman in her 50s had very few antibodies after the initial infection, although they may have restricted the sickness. Re-infection instances were likely limited exceptions, he said, though it was too soon to tell and most were likely to surface in coming weeks.
He added that the new coronavirus appeared more stable than the influenza virus, however, it had been changing.
“Viruses mutate and that usually means that a possible vaccine is not likely to become a vaccine that will last forever, for 10 years, likely not even five years. As for influenza, this might need to be redesigned very regularly,” he said.
Van Ranst, who sits on a Belgian COVID-19 committees, stated vaccine designers would not be surprised.
“We would have loved the virus to become more stable since it is, but you can not force nature,” he explained.
GENETIC TESTING
The National Institute for Public Health in the Netherlands said it had also observed a Dutch instance of re-infection.
Virologist Marion Koopmans was quoted by Dutch broadcaster NOS as saying the patient was an older individual with a weakened immune system.
She said cases where people had been sick with the virus a long period and it then flared up again were known.
But a true re-infection, as in the Dutch, Belgian and Hong Kong cases, demanded genetic testing of this virus in both the initial and second disease to see whether the 2 cases of this virus differed slightly.
Van Ranst said such testing revealed the Belgian individual had caught different strains of this virus.
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a UN briefing in Geneva concerning the Hong Kong event that, while anecdotal reports of re-infections had surfaced now and then, it was essential to have clear documentation.
Some experts say it’s probable that such instances are starting to emerge because of greater testing worldwide, rather than since the virus may be spreading differently.
However, Dr David Strain, a clinical senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and seat of the British Medical Association’s medical academic staff committee, said that the cases were worrying for several reasons.
“The first is that it suggests that previous infection is not protective,” he said. “The second is that it raises the possibility that vaccinations may not supply the expectation that we have been awaiting.”
