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Doctors in France are treating a critically ill patient infected with the South African coronavirus variant, four months after recovering from Covid-19, according to the study’s authors, the first case of its kind.
The 58-year-old man had asthma and initially tested positive for Covid-19 in September when he gave fever and shortness of breath to medical staff.
The symptoms lasted only a few days and the man tested negative twice for Covid-19 in December 2020.
However, he was admitted to hospital in January and diagnosed with the South African variant.
The patient’s condition has worsened and he is currently in a “critical condition” on a ventilator.
“This is, to our knowledge, the first description of re-infection with the South African (variant) causing severe Covid-19, four months after a first mild infection,” said authors of a study published this week in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases has been published.
More contagious
The 501Y.V2 coronavirus variant originated in South Africa at the end of last year and immediately provoked alarm among disease specialists.
It has eight important mutations, one of which affects the protein of the virus, making it more effective at binding to human cells and thus infected.
The vaccine manufacturers Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna say that their mRNA vaccines retain their effectiveness against the South African variants, and another that originated in Britain last year.
However, a study last week showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine could not prevent the mild and moderate cases of infection of the South African variant.
“The impact of 501Y.V2 mutations on the efficacy of vaccines developed on earlier SARS-CoV-2 strains is still unknown,” said the authors of the reinfection study.
(AFP)