South Korean scientists have confirmed that those who have contracted and recovered from the coronavirus will never catch it again, as was previously thought. Experts feared that patients would be infected with the virus twice, after re-examination of those recovered from the virus demonstrated the return of infection to up to 10% of infected people in China after their discharge from hospital.
South Korean scientists have now demonstrated that Covid 19 patients will not relapse after recovering from the disease and blame wrong tests that claim the results of the second test are positive.
This new disclosure would greatly reassure governments, which fear that the infection cycle may not end.
According to the South Korean Central Clinical Committee on Emerging Diseases Control, the reason for the results of positive tests on people who have recovered from the virus is the virus's "fragments" that remain in their bodies, but do not have the ability to infect them again or move from them to infect others.
Doctors seemed to believe that a total of 277 patients had returned to infection, raising fears that mutations in the virus could prevent patients from developing immunity to it, which could complicate the task of finding a vaccine and eliminating the possibility of so-called "herd immunity".
The committee's chairman, Oh Myung-dun, says the subsequent positive results are due to a deficiency in the polymerase chain reaction that reveals the genetic information about the virus in the samples taken from the patients, and that test could not distinguish between "living" RNA and the harmful effects that It can remain in the body of a person who has fully recovered.
"RNA fragments are present in the cell even if the virus is inactive," the committee said in a statement. "It is likely that those who tested positive for HIV have already contracted the RNA virus," the committee adds.
This finding is consistent with the findings of the Korean Centers for Disease Control, which confirmed that patients »relapses are not contagious.
And Dr. Oh says: The life of the respiratory epithelial cell is up to three months, and the RNA of the virus can be detected in the cell by testing the BCR one to two months after the cell is eliminated.
He also stressed that the coronavirus cannot cause a chronic disease by staying inside the nucleus of human cells.
In this regard, the virus that causes Covid 19 differs from HIV and hepatitis B viruses, which can remain inactive and return to their activity later.