Covid-19: Karnataka orders study after reinfection

Karnataka has commissioned a clinical study on Covid-19 reinfection after some alarm was raised about this during a high-level meeting on Monday.

This comes on a day the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) said it detected four cases of Covid-19 reinfection, including a 60-year-old housewife and three resident doctors.

Last week, a 27-year-old Bengaluru woman tested positive for Covid-19 a month after she recovered from the infection. This was seen as the first possible case of Covid-19 reinfection in Bengaluru.

Read | Bengaluru private hospital reports first case of Covid-19 relapse in city

This case was discussed in detail during Medical Education Minister K Sudhakar’s meeting with senior officials where he expressed concern about reinfection.

“I’ve asked for a report on Covid-19 reinfection to be given by the end of this week,” Sudhakar told DH. “We can’t be much perturbed and show our anguish about this right now, but we must take precautions. Those who have recovered should not assume that there can’t be a relapse,” he said.

Sudhakar has asked officials to study Covid-19 reinfection in other countries. “Also, we need to know if reinfection is happening in people who developed antibodies in the first episode or after that,” he said. “If antibodies aren’t generated, it could be possible that they may be susceptible for a second infection within two months. And, if there are other strains of the same virus, it could cause reinfection.

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“There are so many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ that need validation through a proper analysis,” he explained.

Sudhakar said he asked officials to devise a method to keep track of those who have recovered. “We cannot possibly do antibody tests on all three lakh people who have recovered. But, we must have some thumb rule,” he said.

In Ahmedabad, one of the patients visited Kerala before getting infected the second time while the three others remained in the city.

Officials said that these patients had been tested positive first time between April 13 and April 21 and reinfected between August 18 and September 6. “All these cases had mild or asymptomatic disease in first infection as well as in the second infection,” the AMC said in a release.

Officials claim that these cases are “very much in line” with AMC sero-prevalence surveys that suggested a large number of previous infected cases showed loss of antibodies that could result in reinfection.

However, experts said that there is no definite evidence to suggest recurrence of the virus as it requires a lot of research before arriving to a conclusion.

Dileep Mavalankar, director of the Indian Institute of Public Health, said reinfections are being reported in the world and need to be studied.

“We are also seeing reports of long-haulers as the virus lingers in their body.”