On Tuesday, Telangana reported two cases of suspected reinfection of coronavirus among the frontline medical professionals, causing a major concern about the virus. Now the health authorities are probing if there are two different strains of coronavirus that have caused COVID-19.
Even as India is grappling with the raging coronavirus pandemic, cases of reinfection has raised alarms in the country’s fight against the novel contagion. The news of coronavirus reinfection was shared by none other than Health Minister of Telangana Eatala Rajender who remarked that there is no guarantee of the virus not affecting those who had been affected before.
“The virus is new and we are still learning about it daily. There is no surety that the coronavirus won’t strike those who were infected before. Those who are not developing enough antibody to combat the virus stand the chance of being reinfected. Courage is the main drug for taming the pandemic,” Rajender said in media.
The Director of Public Health, Telangana, Dr G Srinivasa Rao while talking to Times of India revealed that the reinfected patients’ RT-PCR tests have come back positive, suggesting that they are suffering from COVID-19. He also added that the patients were asymptomatic initially and that they might have been afflicted by a new strain of coronavirus. The reinfection took place within a span of one and a half months. However, Rao cautioned that they will look whether false positive was recorded in these cases.
Media reports claim that the medical professionals who are reportedly down with coronavirus reinfection worked in ICU and isolation wards of private hospitals and were continuously exposed to the virus. About 2000 cases of coronavirus cases have been reported in the state so far.
The coronavirus cases in Telangana are steadily on the rise. The daily spike of the cases are now clocking over 2,500, taking the total number of infected patients above 1,08,000 mark. There are about 23,737 COVID-19 positive cases in the state and 17,226 people are under home or institutional quarantine in the state.
First confirmed case of reinfection detected in Hong Kong
The first confirmed case of reinfection was reported from Hong Kong, sending alarm bells ringing across the world over the potency of the coronavirus and its ability to infect people who have seemingly developed antibodies against it. A 33-year-old man was detected suffering from coronavirus after recuperating from the initial bout of ccoronavirus earlier in April.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong used genomic sequence to determine that the man was affected by a different strain of coronavirus in the second time. However, he did not develop any grave symptoms from the reinfection, leading researchers to believe that the subsequent infections may be milder as compared to the primary one.
