WHO: Ex-corona-patients who test positive for second time haven’t been re-infected

Although it was said that the first infection with Covid-19 makes you (for a while) immune to a second infection, some tested positive a second time after recovery. The World Health Organization (WHO) finally formulates an answer to the question of why patients can get sick twice from the coronavirus.

There are many examples: a Japanese woman was told in January after she had been cured of the coronavirus, that she had been infected again. Chinese patients who were released from the hospital also tested positive for a second time.

In April, another hundred such cases were reported by the South Korean health authorities. Whether you can be infected twice with Covid-19, people wondered aloud.

Thanks to recent data, the WHO can now state clearly that it is impossible (in the short term) to be infected twice with the coronavirus.

“We are aware that some patients test positive after they have clinically recovered,” said the WHO. According to the WHO, this is not a second infection, but the last remnants of the virus that are expelled from the lungs at that time. “It is part of the recovery phase.”

It is still unclear how long patients infected with the coronavirus can withstand a new infection. Also, experts are not sure how long infected patients will spread the virus accurately.

“To understand how long they spread the virus requires the systematic collection of samples from recovered patients,” concluded the WHO.