[NEWS] 89-year-old Dutch woman becomes 1st patient to die after Covid reinfection: Report

[Nikhel Nice]

89-year-old Dutch woman becomes 1st patient to die after Covid reinfection: Report

 

Researchers say the elderly woman tested positive for Covid-19 twice in a span of 59 days and both her samples were genetically different.

 

 

An 89-year-old woman in the Netherlands has reportedly become the first known person to die of coronavirus after contracting it twice. Reports say the elderly woman was suffering from a rare kind of bone marrow cancer known as Waldenström's macroglobulinemia.

 

According to a report in CNN, the woman's immune system was "compromised" following a therapy she received.

This case was reported in a study carried out by experts at the Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

 

Reinfection and rare cancer

 

As per the CNN report, even though the woman was suffering from a rare cancer, researchers were of the view that her natural immune response could still have been "sufficient to fight-off Covid-19".

 

This, they said, was because the cancer she had was "does not necessarily result in life threatening disease."

 

When she tested positive for Covid-19 for the first time, the woman had a severe cough and fever, and was admitted.

 

"She was discharged five days later when besides some persisting fatigue her symptoms subsided completely," the report said.

Fifty-nine days after she first tested positive for Covid-19, the woman reportedly developed fever, cough and breathing difficulty.

 

She was again tested for Covid-19 and her result came as positive. The CNN report says "no antibodies were detected in her blood system when tested on days four and six".

 

By the eighth day of her chemotherapy, her condition deteriorated and she died two weeks later.

 

Limitations?

 

While the study does confirm that the woman had tested positive on two occasions with a gap of 59 days, she was not tested in between to concretely determine that she had recovered and then got reinfected.

 

"However, upon examining the samples from both cases they found the genetic makeup of the two viruses to be different. They therefore concluded that it is likely that the second episode was a reinfection rather than prolonged shedding," CNN reported.

 

Covid reinfection cases

 

While this is not the first case of Covid reinfection to be reported, but it reportedly is the first case where the patient died following reinfection.

 

The first confirmed and scientifically documented case of Covid reinfection was reported in Hong Kong in August in a 33-year-old man who contracted the virus 142 days after he first tested positive.

 

Following this, cases of reinfections were reported in the Netherlands, Belgium and Ecuador.

 

The latest such confirmation was about a 25-year-old man in Nevada, US who contracted Covid-19 twice in a span of 48 days.

 

Doctors said his second hit was "more severe" and he had to be hospitalised and given oxygen support.

 

The Ecuador patient too had a relatively more severe case of Covid-19 on the second occasion, while the patients in Belgium and the Netherlands had milder disease.