Woman in Japan ‘Re-infected’ with COVID-19 & Why It’s a Bigger Issue Than The China Re-infection Cases

By
George Yang
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Well, this isn’t new, isn’t it?

If you’ve been reading every single COVID-19 article you can find online or offline, you’d have read about how COVID-19 patients in China have been getting “re-infected” after they were discharged from the hospital.

It got so bad that they’re quarantining patients who’ve recovered for 14 days.

And you didn’t freak out because there was a rational explanation for that.

Apparently, it’s alleged that some of these patients have not fully recovered yet; in other words, they were not “re-infected”. There was just some “false negative”.

But this time, it’s a tad different, because this lady who got “re-infected” is from Japan, and she had recovered for at least three weeks before the COVID-19 virus was found in her again.

Here’s what happened.

Woman in Japan Re-infected with COVID-19 & Why It’s a Bigger Issue Than The China Re-infection Cases

The woman, a resident from Osaka who’s in her 40s, was first tested positive on 29 January 2020; that was almost a month ago.

However, she was discharged from the hospital after recovering on 1 February 2020. One more test was done on her on 6 February 2020 and she remained negative.

The tour bus guide then became the first patient in the country to carry the virus again after she was tested positive yesterday (26 February 2020).

The problem now is that it has been almost a month since she got infected, and most people would have recovered by then—which is worrying since that could imply a re-infection instead of a case of a wrong diagnosis.

Either she hadn’t built an immunity to the virus and got infected from someone else, or the virus has mutated.

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The other plausible reason, according to Professor Philip Tierno at New York University’s school of medicine, is that the virus could have stayed dormant. He said, “Once you have the infection, it could remain dormant and with minimal symptoms, and then you can get an exacerbation if it finds its way into the lungs.”

Now, if you’re thinking that the end of the world is coming, fret not; despite re-infection or dormant or whatever it is, more cases worldwide shows that the virus might not be as serious as it looks.

China Fatality Rate vs Rest of the World Fatality Rate

Remember: every disease has a fatality rate, just like every car ride you take has a fatality rate.

To quote an example, the fatality rate of chickenpox for adults is at 0.02% for adults, and for H1N1, which wasn’t contained but became a seasonal flu instead, it is at 0.03%.

If we include China, the fatality rate of COVID-19 is at 3.4%.

If we remove China’s numbers, the fatality rate drops to 1.57%. And if we remove Iran, which has 141 cases and 22 deaths, the rate will be at 1.04%.

Scary number? Not scary if you think of all the undetected cases throughout the world, as South Korea and Italy are reporting a spike in recent days. The exact number isn’t out yet but suffice to say, common sense would conclude that it’s a serious but not-that-deadly virus.

Even Uncle Phua says that:

The only problem now isn’t the fatality rate, but the irrational panic we have due to the many unknowns.

So, continue to stay vigilant but don’t be surprised if COVID-19 goes the H1N1 route.

After all, do you know that out of ten people in Singapore, one would most probably have H1N1 before?

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George Yang
Email: [email protected]