Reinfection fears growing due to the other new South Africa 🇿🇦 discovered #SARSCoV2 variant (that shares the 501Y mutation w/ 🇬🇧 discovered B117). Not only faster spread, but SA experts noticing it coinciding with a lot of reinfections. Thread 🧵 #COVID19
wsj.com/articles/coron…
2) “Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist—said its discovery has coincided with another worrying development: Doctors are reporting more patients, including health-care workers, who are testing positive for Covid-19 a 2nd time, after having had it in the first wave.”
3) “We are genuinely concerned, and that’s why we need to do research to understand this variant as quickly as we can,” Dr. Lessells and doctors treating Covid-19 patients in 🇿🇦 said they haven’t been able to prove whether these repeat positive tests are genuine reinfections—“
4) “which many scientists have believed are exceedingly rare—or the resurgence of an earlier illness. South Africa’s public health-care system generally tests only people who have Covid-19 symptoms.
5) “Complicating matters, most South African labs don’t store coronavirus testing samples longer than a few weeks, which means it is almost impossible to check whether a new infection stems from a different variant of the virus.”
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