Stanley Perlman, a coronavirus expert at the University of Iowa told Global News that when it comes to these cases, officials need to determine
whether the patients are really re-infected, or if the virus was “never really cleared” from their bodies.
Either way, Perlman says it is a “puzzling observation.”
“I think either of these scenarios is a bit concerning because we would have expected the infected person to have made an immune response so that you couldn’t be reinfected, certainly not two or three weeks later,” he said. “On the other hand, we would have expected the virus to be completely cleared so it couldn’t recrudescence two or three weeks later.”
But, Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, told the
New York Times it’s unlikely people are being infected for a second time.
“I’m not saying that reinfection can’t occur, will never occur, but in that short time it’s unlikely,” he said.
He said what is more likely to have happened is that the patients had low levels of the virus in their system when they were discharged by the hospital and that testing had failed to detect it.