An 89-year-old Dutch woman died of Covid-19 after being infected twice. She suffered from an immune deficiency due to her treatment for her cancer.
According to the doctors who treated her, “ its innate immune response and T cell immunity are normally sufficient to clear SARS CoV-2 », They underline in an article published in the review Clinical Infectious Diseases.
The patient had spent five days in hospital this summer for a severe cough and then tested positive for Covid-19.
Two days after the start of his chemotherapy, or 59 days after having tested positive for Covid, the octogenarian again develops a cough and fever, accompanied by breathing difficulties. With no antibodies detected in her blood, she tested positive again on the RT-PCR test. She will die two weeks later.
For the doctors, it is indeed a reinfection and not a first prolonged infection, because two different strains of the virus were discovered during the tests.
The vagueness of reinfection cases
Since the first officially recorded case of reinfection in the world, in China, only a few similar cases have been identified, some asymptomatic, others more serious.
For now, it is still difficult to get an idea of the duration of the antibodies and the immune response to a second infection with the new coronavirus.
