A 25-year-old Nevada man has been infected with SARS-CoV-2 twice, CNBC reports, noting that this is the first case of reinfection reported in the US and only one of a handful reported globally.
A case report appearing in the Lancet Infectious Diseases describes a man, a resident of Washoe County, who first tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 on a PCR test on April 18, 2020 and then again on June 5, 2020, even though he tested negative for the virus twice in May. At both times he tested positive, he had symptoms of COVID-19, including cough and headache, but in June, his symptoms were more severe and he had to be admitted to the hospital and given oxygen.
The University of Nevada's Mark Pandori and his colleagues sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 samples collected from the patient by nasopharyngeal swabs to find that the viral samples from April and June were distinct, suggesting he had been reinfected.
How common reinfections are is not yet clear, USA Today notes. "It could be a one in a million event, we don't know," Yale University's Akiko Iwasaki, who wrote a commentary accompanying the case report, tells the paper.