The patient from Holland was reinfected after overcoming Covid-19 in the first wave of the virus.
HOLLAND (Times Media Mexico) – The first person in the world reinfected with the coronavirus died less than three weeks after contracting Covid-19 for the second time.
The woman, 89, suffered from a rare type of bone marrow cancer called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia. Her immune system was compromised due to the cell-depleting therapy she received, the researchers at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands wrote in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
The patient, 89 years old, received chemotherapy for Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, a rare type of white blood cell cancer, which is treatable but incurable.
Virologist Marion Koopmans reported that the patient had to be admitted to the hospital in the first wave of infection after developing a high fever and severe cough symptoms.
Two months after the coronavirus was overcome, the woman began new chemotherapy sessions. Still, she began to have a fever, cough, and suffer from severe shortness of breath only two days later, so she was readmitted to the hospital.
After undergoing PCR, the woman tested positive. However, she tested negative on two serological tests to detect if she still had antibodies to the virus in her blood after she was first infected.
The patient was hospitalized for eight days, and her health condition deteriorated drastically, and she died two weeks later, reported the Dutch authorities.
Koopmans, who participates in a follow-up of reinfections done by the University of Oxford, commented that the patient was already very sick of her other ailment besides the coronavirus.
25 cases of coronavirus reinfections worldwide
According to Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, there are currently about 25 cases of coronavirus reinfections known worldwide, and in most cases, less severe symptoms developed than during the first infection.
While scientists assume that reinfections are still “the exception,” Koopmans believes that “there will be more” but nuances that “the important question remains whether this is typical of Covid-19,” since in many cases, the second transmission took place just two months after the first infection.
It is expected that most people who have overcome the first infection with coronavirus are now protected “longer” against Covid-19. He acknowledged that, in any case, “this will not last a lifetime because it has never been seen with any respiratory virus.
The specialist indicated that it is still unclear what the knowledge of these specific cases could mean when developing the vaccine against the coronavirus, nor to what extent the immune system learns enough during the first infection with Covid-19.
However, he added, the naturally produced antibodies after an initial infection seem to disappear relatively quickly in certain cases.
