LUCKNOW: Forty-five days after recovering from Covid-19, a case of alleged re-infection of a doctor at the Gautam Budh Nagar district hospital has surfaced.
The doctor tested positive for the virus for a second time after a series of tests were conducted to ascertain whether he had contracted it again or not.
As per sources, the doctor, while being deputed in the isolation ward of Super Specialty Paediatric Hospital and Post Graduate Teaching Institute, had tested positive for the deadly virus on May 15.
He was then admitted to the same ward. The doctor, after convalescing in the hospital for 15 days, was discharged on May 30 only after testing negative for the virus twice.
Then following the protocol, the doctor remained quarantined for two more weeks and resumed duty thereafter at the hospital in Sector 30.
However, sources now claim that around two weeks ago he complained of giddiness but did not have any other Covid-19 symptom like fever or cough.
Leaving nothing to chance, his colleagues tested his sample through rapid antigen technique which showed the doctor positive for coronavirus, said the sources adding that to confirm the results, a second confirmatory test was done through lab-based reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). This test also confirmed the doctor to be coronavirus positive on June 27.
Experts and biologists, however, said a re-infection was unlikely and it could be that the person never fully recovered from the first infection.
A senior doctor of Government Institute of Medical Sciences (GIMS), Greater Noida claimed that people who have had the virus would have developed Covid-19 antibodies which protect the patient from recurrent infection.
“In this case, the patient might not have recovered completely from the first spell of infection. Even in some cases, the protective antibodies fade away from the body,” said the doctor.