Peer-review started: September 2, 2020
First decision: September 21, 2020
Revised: September 23, 2020
Accepted: November 19, 2020
Article in press: November 19, 2020
Published online: December 15, 2020
Processing time: 99 Days and 12.2 Hours
Due to the high rate of transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (CoVID-19), a large number of people around the world became infected with the virus. There is evidence of reinfection with this virus. Therefore, people who get the disease once may be reinfected after reCoVery. Further investigation of reinfection by CoVID-19 is one of the necessities for better management of current conditions.
There have been reports of reCoVered individuals who have a second positive coronary test. This has raised concerns that there is no guarantee that the body will be safe after corona disease, even in the short term.
The aim of the present study was to investigate the available evidence of reinfection in patients with CoVID-19 who have reCoVered.
This is a review study of different research types. Since there are myriads of publications released each and every day, with each trying to shed light on this pandemic from different perspectives, we aimed to summarize the very recent and of course the most trustworthy studies regarding the possibility of reinfection of CoVID-19 in this review in order to provide health care professionals and researchers imminent access to a multitude of these studies via a concise resource to save their invaluable time for other yet to do tasks.
The results have shown that there is a slight chance of reinfection. Though the duration of immunity is still unknown and needs to be determined; there is no guarantee that infected patients will not be infected again according to our results. These reinfections can be related to immunity system problems in cases of immunosuppressive disease or drugs that can misdirect our results, but there were many cases that got reinfected without any sign of the problems mentioned above.
Based on the available evidence, reinfection in improved patients has been proven. Still, there is not enough data to definitely distinguish reinfection, reactivation, or infection with a new mutated severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. So, further studies are necessary to understand if a CoVID-19 recurrence is possible and whether it could be considered a real threat.
We strongly suggest further studies to follow up discharged CoVID-19 patients, check their course of symptoms periodically, and analyze related antibody levels; widespread virological studies are necessary to understand better this new global predicament.