A 31yearold woman who received a booster shot against Covid tested positive for the omicron variant of SarsCoV2 just 20 days after her Delta infection. For the researchers who described the case in Spain, this is the shortest known distance between two Covid infections. The protagonist of the double record contagion is a health worker.
The woman has contracted Covid19 twice in 3 weeks, according to a statement from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (Eccmid 2022, scheduled for April 2326 in Lisbon, Portugal) where the case will be presented . She tested positive for the first time on December 20th, 2021 in a PCR test (the classic molecular smear) during the screening of staff at the workplace. She had received the booster 12 days earlier and had not developed any symptoms. She isolated for 10 days before returning to work. And on January 10, 2022, just 20 days after the first positive test, she developed a cough, fever, general malaise. He performed another PCR test. This too was positive.
Sequencing of the entire virus genome showed that the patient was infected with two different SarsCoV2 strains. The first infection took place in December with the Delta variant. The second in January with the Omicron variant, which was classified as a variant of concern by the World Health Organization just over a month earlier, on November 26, 2021.
Omicron has quickly become the world’s dominant variant, it is much more contagious than Delta and can evade immunity from previous infections and vaccinations, explain the experts who dealt with the ultrarapid reinfection case. A case that, as one of the study’s authors, Gemma Recio, from the Institut Català de Salut in Tarragona, Spain, points out, “highlights the potential of the Omicron variant to bypass previous immunity generated by natural infection with other variants.” was acquired or from vaccinations.
“People who have had Covid he continues cannot assume that they will be protected from reinfection even if they have been fully vaccinated. However, both previous infection with other variants and vaccination appear to partially protect against serious illness and hospitalization,” says Omicron.
For Recio, the close double contagion also shows “the need to carry out genomic surveillance of viruses in infections affecting fully vaccinated people and in reinfections in cured people. This monitoring will help identify variants with the ability to partially evade the response. immune”.