Recovery of COVID-19 Does Not Mean Immunity

There is more on the COVID-19 situation. The government continues to encourage social distancing and proper hygiene to prevent the spread of the virus. A motion to extend the state of emergency for an additional sixty days has been passed by the House of Representatives and approved by the Senate. It is expected that at least three more persons will be declared recovered over the coming weekend. But while they have officially recovered, it does not mean that they have developed immunity to the deadly novel coronavirus. In today’s Ask the Experts webcast, Doctor Marvin Manzanero explains that the possibility of a recovered patient contracting the disease again is very real.

Marvin Manzanero

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Services

“You will not also that it has been sixteen, seventeen days since we last announced the last four cases. We are in the process of re-swabbing the last four cases to see if they have recovered or not. Our perception is by Friday of this week we should be having three or four persons out of those seven recovered.  That recovered notion is something that we need to be very careful about because we say somebody has recovered when you have two negative COVID-19 tests. We want to make sure that people are in point of fact are not going to be having any further viral shedding so eventually we would have to come back to these persons and re-swab them again. Just reading a story earlier of somebody who had tested initially negative positive, then negative, then positive, then negative and positive again. Not in Belize but that is part of the ongoing dynamic that we have in terms of COVID-19. So all those patients that have deemed to have recovered we need to understand that they still need to take the necessary precautions. They still need to be able to use a mask, assuming that they can still be affecting others. Understand now that there is literature that clearly indicates that doesn’t seem that everybody develops immunity. If that is the case then that means that the patient is going to get re-infected again or can potentially get re-infected again because you have not develop immunity to be able to develop to stem off another wave of infection.”