8:00 PM
Thursday 13 August 2020
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Books – Sayed Metwally
It seems that the new Corona virus is returning again to attack the bodies of infected people even after the stage of recovery and surviving the deadly epidemic, after Covid-19 struck a Chinese woman for the second time.
“Masrawy” reviews the infection of the Chinese woman, with Corona again, and what is the truth about building immunity against the epidemic, according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”.
According to local officials in Beijing, a 68-year-old Chinese woman in Jingzhou, adjacent to Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus, was diagnosed with the Coronavirus for the second time in six months after recovering from the disease last February, to raise questions about natural immunity. And whether people could become infected again.
The woman was diagnosed with COVID-19 for the second time on August 9, and she had previously tested positive on February 8 and beat the disease later that month, according to the Jingzhou government.
The patient was placed in quarantine to receive treatment, all her close contacts were tracked and tested for infection, but the interesting thing is that so far, there have been no scientifically proven cases of a person who was infected twice, as experts refer this to inaccurate test results or a prolonged disease, Some say it is not uncommon for parts of viruses to continue to spread even after recovery.
The nature of viruses suggests that people who have already contracted corona should acquire at least a temporary level of immunity, but such cases put the idea of natural protection into question, in addition to concerns about reinfection, there are also signs that people may remain ill for a long time with The virus continues to spread in their bodies, and this case is evidence that some patients have been diagnosed with Coronavirus more than once.
A research entitled “ A case report on a possible return of infection with the new Coronavirus 2019 ” was recently published in the United States, describing the case of an 82-year-old man who was hospitalized twice due to the virus, and the unidentified man went to the emergency department of Massachusetts General Hospital after contracting a fever For a week, he tested positive for COVID-19 and then his condition rapidly worsened while in hospital.
Doctors managed to save his life by putting him on a long-term ventilator, but he fell ill again after less than two weeks, despite testing negative twice before being discharged from the hospital.
He again needed intensive care and recovered a second time, although his state of health was not revealed after that, and paramedics discussed in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine how it could have been that the man had recovered and tested negative but fell ill again.
His medics said that instead of getting infected twice, he likely did not fully recover the first time, and that the tests were not accurate enough to note that he was still carrying the virus.
Doctors led by Dr. Nicole Dujan said: “Many viruses show a prolonged presence of the genetic material in the body even after the live virus is removed and the symptoms disappear. Therefore, the discovery of the genetic material by the swab test alone is not necessarily related to the active infection.”
A study indicates that getting rid of the SARS-Cove-2 virus may last from 20 to 22 days after the onset of symptoms, on average, with some rare cases that may last up to 44 days.
Since the virus was only detected for the first time in December, scientists haven’t had a chance to see how it affects people in the long term.
In one study conducted by the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, researchers suggested that the coronavirus may work in the same way as other viruses that cause colds and other infections.
Researchers followed 10 volunteers for 35 years and tested them each summer against four seasonal viruses called “NL63, 229E, OC43 and HKU1”. These viruses are more common and cause mild cold-like illnesses.
And they found that those who contracted the strains – from the same family as SARS-Cove-2, the type that causes corona, had an alarmingly short, protective immunity.
Levels of antibodies, which are substances the immune system stores to allow the body to fight future invaders, fell by 50 percent after half a year and completely disappeared after four years.
By studying how people recover from viruses from the same family as the ones that cause corona, scientists say that their research has focused on the most comprehensive study of how immunity works with the disease that appeared in China last year.
The scientists who wrote in the study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal or reviewed by other scientists, said that seasonal Covid-19 viruses are the most representative group of viruses through which the general characteristics of the Corona virus can be deduced, especially common factors such as the functioning of immunity, and susceptibility to infection again. .
In conclusion, seasonal human coronaviruses do not have much in common, except for causing the common cold, however, they all seem to stimulate short-term immunity with rapid loss of antibodies.
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