3-10% Of Recovered C.OVID-19 Patients In New Study Get Re-Infected: Doctors Say

Researchers around the world are still trying their best to study Covid-19. In particular, one of their most concerns is whether or not a recovered patient could be infectious after being discharged from the hospital and will they develop antibodies that offer them immunity to the disease?

Doctors at Tongji Hospital, Wuhan City conducted a research study on that matter with the participation of 147 recovered coronavirus patients. The result shows that 5 people tested positive in the nucleic acid tests, accounting for 3% of the 147 recovered patients.

In addition, the doctors confirmed to CCTV that there is currently no evidence showing that patients who were infected the coronavirus were infectious, according to laboratory tests and observations of their family members.

Even though the scope of the study was quite small (147 patients), the conclusion of Tongji Hospital was in line with the situation in China. The outbreak started last December, leaving more than 81,000 people infected and over 3,200 dead in the country. But now, around 90% of COVID-19 patients have recovered. That means the number of patients recovering is higher than those who are newly-infected, thus rejecting the hypothesis that recovered patients could be infectious.

Besides Dong Te Hospital’s research, another study published in the health magazine Life Times (affiliated with People's Daily) claimed that only 5 to 10 percent of patients tested positive again after recovery.

Previously, the magazine reported many recovered patients have re-infected with coronavirus, including a family of three. Such incidents have raised questions about the stability and sensitivity of nucleic acid tests as well as the process of collecting and handling patient samples.

The new research by Tongji Hospital could be an attempt to clear these doubts. Tongji Hospital's director Wang Wei said that even though five patients in the study tested positive, they did not develop any symptoms, and their families in close contact with them were not infected.

“So far there is no evidence to suggest that they are infectious,” - Director Wang expressed. In addition, Mr. Wang said monitoring a similar group of patients showed that 80-90% had no trace of the virus in their blood after 1 month of recovery.

Nevertheless, he did acknowledge that the sample size is relatively small. “These are just small samples and not enough to assure us of the validity of our initial findings. We need a large-scale epidemiological study to guide our disease surveillance and prevention works.”

Mr. Wang recommends that recovered patients after being discharged from the hospital to isolate for two weeks, then take another test to make sure they are not "re-infected".

Respiratory disease expert Tong Chaohui also shared the same view that it’s necessary to keep monitoring recovered patients.

“So far, none of the close family members of these recovered patients have been tested positive and we could not find the coronavirus in the laboratory cultured samples [from these patients]. Although the nucleic acid tests were positive, random checking suggested that the patients have developed antibodies that were effective in protecting them from the nucleic acid of the virus,” Tong told CCTV.

In response to the official publication Hubei Daily, Tu Yuanchao, deputy director of the Hubei Provincial Health Committee, said recovered patients who are having symptoms need to go to the hospital while those who are asymptomatic have to be in isolation for 2 weeks.

In summary, the two independent studies show that only around 3 to 10 percent of patients are reinfected with COVID-19 after being discharged from the hospital, but they are not infectious.

>>> Odisha To Build Largest COVID-19 Hospital With 1,000 Beds In 15 Days