After Gujarat, Karnataka witnesses COVID-19 relapse case
Karnataka has witnessed its first case of COVID-19 relapse after a patient who had recovered from the disease tested positive for it again.
A COVID-19 patient from Belagavi, who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 on April 16, was discharged from the hospital on May 4 after testing negative twice as per the protocol. However, his symptoms resurfaced again and he tested positive the next day.
While the patient should have ideally been placed under home quarantine, in this case, he was kept under observation in another hospital for his heart ailment. Microbiologists at the Belagavi Institute of Medical Sciences (BIMS) are still investigating how the virus had resurfaced.
“After the treatment, two sets of swab samples were sent to BIMS and National Institute of Virology, Bangalore. Both tested negative for COVID-19. But the case resurfaced within a day,” Chief Microbiologist Dr Mahantesh Parende said.
While they are still researching, there is also a possibility of dead virus fragments causing COVID-19 reinfection, which has been proved in other countries, he said. “It also depends on the viral load. At times the viral loads become dormant and then resurfaces. So this could be one such case.”
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Dr CP Nanjaraj of Mysore Medical College said there were two possibilities — the person could have come in contact with a positive patient again or he had low immunity and hence the virus resurfaced. He said it was an unusual case as people who contract the virus build antibodies against the pathogen which should have ideally helped the patient.
The World Health Organization also did not agree with the theory that individuals could only catch the coronavirus once. In a scientific brief, the WHO said there was enough evidence about the effectiveness of antibody-mediated immunity.
“People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice. The use of such certificates may therefore increase the risks of continued transmission,” it said.
The reemergence of the virus in patients who are declared recovered is not new. Within India, it occurred in Gujarat last month. Several cases suffered relapses in the state. Similar instances were also reported in South Korea, China and Japan.
A study published on the preprint server Medrxiv, a medical archive portal supported by Yale University in the US, says nearly 14.5 per cent of the recovered patients, who were examined in China’s Wuhan for a period of month, tested positive again.
