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FRIDAY, Oct. 16, 2020 (HealthDay News) — An elderly woman in the Netherlands died after contracting COVID-19 a second time, which researchers say may be the world’s first known death after reinfection.
The woman was being treated for cancer when she developed a fever and severe cough and was diagnosed with COVID-19. She went home five days later and, other than lingering fatigue, recovered from her symptoms, CBS News reported.
But 59 days after the start of her first COVID-19 infection, she developed symptoms again. She tested positive for COVID-19 again and died weeks later, according to the case study accepted for publication in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
The woman was infected with two different strains and it is unclear if she ever became immune following each infection, according to the researchers, who said “it is likely that the second episode was a reinfection rather than prolonged shedding,” CBS News reported.
There have been other reported cases of coronavirus reinfection. For example, a 25-year-old man in Nevada was infected twice by two different strains. His second infection was more severe than the first and lasted about six weeks, researchers recently reported in the The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.
COVID-19 reinfection also occurred in a patient in Hong Kong, CBS News reported.
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Source: MedicineNet.com
