A 45-year-old woman who seemed recovered from coronavirus and tested negative twice a month ago has now been hospitalised again with both the symptoms and a positive test for the disease.
The incident took place at the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in the city of Hadera in the Haifa District in northwestern Israel when the 45-year-old woman who had been pronounced all clear and cured began suffering from a fever and chest pains.
She was given a COVID-19 test which came back positive despite the fact that a month earlier she had been discharged from the same hospital after seemingly recovering.
Local media report the woman, from the Arab town of Jisr az-Zarqa, has been hospitalised between 6th and 11th April before being discharged after testing negative twice.
Reports have suggested that the tests which came back negative at the time could have been false negatives but this would not explain why her symptoms subsided for a month before returning.
The incident comes after an 86-year-old man in northern Israel was told he had recovered from COVID-19 before being hospitalised again a week later in a serious condition suffering from the virus again.
Francois Ballou, Director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, has said that a possible explanation for cases of ‘reinfected patients’ is that the virus never fully disappeared, but instead remained dormant and asymptomatic similar to a “chronic infection” such as herpes.
The World Health Organization’s technical lead, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove recently told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that test results suggesting patients in South Korea had been reinfected after recovering from coronavirus were actually false positives caused by dead lung cells.
There have been no updates on the condition of the 45-year-old woman.
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Story By: Alex Cope, Sub-Editor: Michael Leidig, Agency: Newsflash
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