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Doctors in France are treating a critically ill patient infected with the South African coronavirus variant four months after he recovered from Covid-19, which the study authors said was the first of its kind.
The 58-year-old man had a history of asthma and initially tested positive for Covid-19 in September when he presented to medical staff with fever and shortness of breath.
The symptoms lasted only a few days, and the man tested negative for Covid-19 twice in December 2020.
However, he was hospitalized in January and was diagnosed with the South African variant.
The patient’s condition deteriorated and he is currently in a “critical condition” on a ventilator.
“This is, to our knowledge, the first description of South African (variant) reinfection to cause severe Covid-19, four months after an initial mild infection,” said authors of a study published this week in the journal Clinical. Infectious Diseases has been published.
More contagious
The coronavirus variant 501Y.V2 surfaced in South Africa at the end of last year and immediately caused an alarm among disease specialists.
It has eight key mutations, one of which affects the virus’s spike protein, causing it to bind more effectively to human cells and thereby make it more infectious.
Vaccine manufacturers Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna say their mRNA vaccines maintain their effectiveness against the South African variants and another that emerged in Britain last year.
However, a study last week showed that AstraZeneca’s vaccine failed to prevent mild and moderate cases of infection of the South African variant.
“The impact of 501Y.V2 mutations on the effectiveness of vaccines developed from previous SARS-CoV-2 strains is still unknown,” said the authors of the reinfection study.
(AFP)