Explained The Reason For Positive Tests For COVID In Already Cured

2023 Author: Abraham Higgins | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-27 23:16

Explained the reason for positive tests for COVID in already cured

Korean scientists believe that the hundreds of positive tests for coronavirus in people who have recently recovered are not due to "reactivation" of infection or reinfection.

Photo: Andong Festival Tourism Foundation

South Korea reported last month that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was detected in many patients believed to be cured of COVID-19. Korean scientists argue that these cases are associated with false-positive test results, and not with re-infection or "reactivation" of the disease. Gizmodo talks about this with reference to the Korean media.

South Korea has become one of the countries with the largest testing coverage for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The tests there were conducted on people who would not have been tested for virus isolation in other countries. Among those who were sampled were those who had already recovered from COVID-19.

Reports of positive tests in recently cured individuals raised concerns about the possibility of reinfection as soon as possible after recovery or "reactivation" of the virus in the body. But now Korean experts argue that it is impossible to make such statements based on the available data.

Korean scientists, who investigated the situation with the "re-infection", came to the conclusion that this is rather a kind of false-positive reaction of PCR tests. They point out that the tests cannot distinguish live viruses from dead ones.

Oh Myoung, an infectious disease specialist at Seoul National University, told the Korea Herald that the positive coronavirus tests in recovered people appear to have been due to the PCR method detecting dead virus particles that patients were still shedding.

According to Oh, the epithelium of the respiratory tract lives for several months (half of its cells are replaced in three months). Therefore, the RNA of the virus, preserved in these epithelial cells, can be secreted and unexpectedly detected in swabs from the nasopharynx of already healthy people.

Korean scientists did not find any signs that the coronavirus can remain alive in the body for a long time and be activated after a while. O and his colleagues also report that there was no reinfection in the reported cases. At the same time, these examples still do not prove that COVID-19 cannot be infected a second time.