The World Health Organization (WHO) today considered Covid-19 reinfections to be “almost irrelevant” from a statistical point of view.
The words were used by WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove, who was speaking at the usual press conference call at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
According to the technical leader of the WHO response to covid-19, “there were only a few cases of reinfection”, among the more than 27.1 million infected worldwide, and “so far have not been very relevant”.
“In any case, we continue to study them in laboratories in different countries,” he said.
The specialist in emerging infectious diseases pointed out that, until now, people infected with the new coronavirus, including asymptomatic ones, have triggered the formation of antibodies that give a certain protection against possible reinfections after a week or two. know for how long.
Maria Van Kerkhove said that scientists are studying what antibodies will have formed in patients who have been re-infected, such as that of a Hong Kong patient who traveled to Spain shortly before having covid-19 for the second time.
The covid-19 pandemic has already claimed at least 889,498 deaths and infected more than 27.1 million people in 196 countries and territories, according to a report by the French news agency AFP.
In Portugal, 1,843 people out of the 60,507 confirmed to be infected died, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health.
Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus (virus type) detected in late December in Wuhan, a city in central China.