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stormwyrm [soylentnews.org] writes:

There have been worrying signs that it is possible to have COVID-19 reinfection [sciencetimes.com], such that getting sick with the disease and recovering might not confer subsequent immunity to the disease as with other similar diseases. This would make controlling the spread of the disease much more difficult. However, further studies by Korean infectious disease experts seem to show that these reports of reinfection may be due to false positives, since the PCR tests South Korea uses for diagnosing COVID-19 infections also detect remnant RNA strands of the virus, which can persist in the body of a previously infected person for months without causing further disease. The Korea Herald reports [koreaherald.com]:

South Korea’s infectious disease experts said Thursday that dead virus fragments were the likely cause of over 260 people here testing positive again for the novel coronavirus days and even weeks after marking full recoveries.

Oh Myoung-don, who leads the central clinical committee for emerging disease control, said the committee members found little reason to believe that those cases could be COVID-19 reinfections or reactivations, which would have made global efforts to contain the virus much more daunting.

“The tests detected the ribonucleic acid of the dead virus,” said Oh, a Seoul National University hospital doctor, at a press conference Thursday held at the National Medical Center.

He went on to explain that in PCR tests, or polymerase chain reaction tests, used for COVID-19 diagnosis, genetic materials of the virus amplify during testing, whether it is from a live virus or just from fragments of dead virus cells that can take months to clear from recovered patients.

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