A 25-year-old man in Nevada is believed to be the first coronavirus patient in the United States to recover from the illness and then contract it a second time.
The Reno resident experienced a wide range of COVID-19 symptoms before testing positive for the first time on April 18, researchers found in a study that was released Thursday as a pre-print. A pre-print means the study has not yet undergone a formal peer review.
By April 27, the man’s symptoms had subsided, and he received a negative coronavirus test result. Despite the recovery, more than a month later, on May 31, he was hospitalized and reported having similar symptoms to his first infection while also experiencing dizziness and a fever. A second coronavirus test was then performed on the man, and he tested positive.
“The patient had tested negative on two separate occasions in the interim. The genomes of the patient’s virus samples were sequenced in April and June, displaying significant genetic discordance between the two cases, implying the patient was infected twice,” according to a news release by the University of Nevada’s Reno School of Medicine.
Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory, said that while the potential case of the reinfection could be a warning sign for the virus’s ability to be contracted more than once, it is not possible to generalize based on this one case.
“If reinfection is possible on such a short timeline, there may be implications for the efficacy of vaccines developed to fight the disease. It may also have implications for herd immunity,” Pandori said. “It is important to note that this is a singular finding. It does not provide any information to us with regard to the generalizability of this phenomenon.”
A study out of Hong Kong released earlier this week found that a 33-year-old man contracted the coronavirus twice. Researchers believe the case to be the world’s first documented instance of reinfection. Experts in Europe also reported cases of reinfection this week after the Hong Kong announcement.
Worldwide, there have been more than 24 million cases of the coronavirus and at least 833,000 deaths since the pandemic first began in China in late 2019.
