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COVID-19 Reinfection Risk Questioned After Low Levels Of Antibodies Found In Recovered Patients

Chinese scientists are hoping to find out whether recovered coronavirus patients have a higher risk of reinfection, after finding low levels of antibodies in people discharged from hospital in a small, preliminary study.

Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai analysed blood sampled from 175 patients who had been released from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center. The results showed nearly a third had low levels of antibodies and in some patients, they could not be detected at all, the South China Morning Post reports.

The study, published in Medrxiv, has not been peer-reviewed. This means it is yet to be reviewed by a panel of experts who can judge the merit of the findings before it is published in a scientific journal. However, it is the first systematic research into antibody levels in patients who had recovered from COVID-19. The team say further research should be carried out into whether patients are at high risk of reinfection.

All of the patients had recently recovered from mild symptoms of the disease and most of those with low antibody levels were young. The researchers did not include patients who had been admitted to intensive care units because many of them already had antibodies from donated blood plasma—a treatment where serum from the blood of recovered patients is given to people with the virus to provide them with COVID-19 antibodies.

https://www.newsweek.com/covid-19-reinfection-risk-questioned-after-low-levels-antibodies-found-recovered-patients-1496776

Neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in a COVID-19 recovered patient cohort and their implications:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047365v1