The coronavirus may be reactivating in people who’ve recovered, Bloomberg reported.
About 51 patients classed as having been cured in South Korea have tested positive again, Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday, the news outlet reported.
But rather than getting re-infected, the virus may have been reactivated in those people, since they tested positive shortly after being released from quarantine, said Jeong Eun-kyeong, director-general of the Korean CDC.
“While we are putting more weight on reactivation as the possible cause, we are conducting a comprehensive study on this,” Jeong said, Bloomberg reported. “There have been many cases when a patient during treatment will test negative one day and positive another.”
A patient is deemed fully recovered when two tests conducted within a 24-hour interval show negative results, the news outlet noted.
South Korea was one of the earliest countries to see a big coronavirus outbreak, but the country has had just 200 deaths and a falling new case tally since peaking at 1,189 on Feb. 29, Bloomberg reported.
One of the world’s most expansive testing programs and a tech-driven approach to tracing infections has seen Korea contain its epidemic without lockdowns or shuttering businesses, Bloomberg reported.
As of Thursday, South Korea had 10,423 virus cases, according to Johns Hopkins Univerity.
As of Wednesday, 6,776 virus patients had been released from the hospital, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg.
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