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Woman Dies After Catching COVID-19 a Second Time

Accepted submission by upstart at 2020-10-15 10:27:48
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Woman dies after catching COVID-19 a second time [futurism.com]:

For the first time that we know of, a COVID-19 patient has died after recovering from the coronavirus once and then catching it again.

The 89-year-old woman initially recovered from COVID after spending a few days in the hospital. Two months later, she tested positive again and her condition rapidly deteriorated before she ultimately died, CNN [cnn.com] reports [cnn.com]. That makes her the first confirmed death of a patient who caught COVID-19 two separate times, and one of just a few confirmed reinfections overall.

The doctors who oversaw her case noticed a particularly troubling detail. According to their research [dutchnews.nl], which has been accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, the woman didn’t have any COVID-19 antibodies in her blood when she tested positive the second time, suggesting that any resistance to the disease built up by our immune systems can rapidly deteriorate [futurism.com].

The woman was undergoing treatment for a rare bone marrow cancer, CNN reports, but the doctors say it’s unlikely that her immunocompromised state contributed to her death.

The news follows a report, also from this week, of the first COVID-19 patient to catch the coronavirus twice and have a more severe case [futurism.com] the second time around.

In both instances, doctors confirmed that the patients caught the coronavirus twice — rather than having it temporarily go dormant — because they both had genetically different strains across infections.

As more instances of COVID-19 reinfection pop up, doctors are calling into question the assumptions that they made [futurism.com] about how our immune system responds to the coronavirus. It turns out, in other words, that our biological defenses may not be as robust as many thought.


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