MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th October, 2020) Researchers are reporting what appears to be the first death from a reinfection with the coronavirus, the patient was an 89-year-old Dutch woman suffering from a type of white blood cell cancer.
"Here, we report a case of a reinfection, in an 89-year old Dutch woman, suffering from Waldenström's macroglobulinemia, treated with B-cell-depleting therapy. She presented to the emergency department with fever and severe cough and a lymphocyte count of 0.4x109/L. An in-house SARS-CoV-2 RT-qPCR (E-gen),[2]on a nasopharyngeal swab was positive," the researchers said in their findings published in the Oxford University Press.
The patient was discharged after five days and eventually her symptoms subsided. However, about two months later, she contracted the coronavirus again.
"Two days after a new chemotherapy treatment, fifty-nine days after the start of the first COVID-19 episode, the patient developed fever, cough, and dyspnea. At admission, her oxygen saturation was 90% with a respiratory rate of 40/min. The SARS-CoV-2 RT-qPCR on a nasopharyngeal swab was positive ... At day 8, the condition of the patient deteriorated. She died two weeks later," the researchers said.
According to Dutch media reports, this is the first case of a death from a reinfection with COVID-19.
Over 20 cases of coronavirus reinfection have been confirmed globally, including in Hong Kong, the US, Europe and Ecuador.
Professor Santiago Mas-Coma, the president of the World Federation for Tropical Medicine and an expert member of the World Health Organization, told Sputnik in August that the known reinfection cases were detected due to the fact that patients were reinfected with coronavirus strains different from the ones that had caused their initial infection.
Last month, researchers from the Danderyd Hospital in Stockholm revealed that antibodies for COVID-19 can remain in the blood of a person who has been cured of the disease for another four months.
