A woman who had recovered from the coronavirus was re-hospitalized a month later after testing positive again.
Last week, the 45-year-old woman from Jisr e-Zarka was re-admitted to Hadera's Hillel Yaffe Medical Center, where she was initially hospitalized with fever and chest pains, Channel 12 reported on Sunday.
This comes a month after she was discharged from the medical center having recovered from the virus and testing negative twice.
The issue of how the woman tested positive for the virus a second time has raised many questions in Israel and has no definite answer.
The matter of if and how someone can test positively for the virus twice has been discussed among experts around the globe. While some theorize that the tests were inaccurately done, others have discussed the possibility of reinfection. In late April, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently said in that, "there is no evidence that a recovered COVID-19 patient cannot be reinfected."
Earlier in April, Prof. Ronit Sarid, a virology expert at Bar-Ilan University, said that there are two possibilities for this conundrum. The first is that certain people carry the virus for long periods, called a “persistent infection.” The second is that sometimes a percentage of SARS-CoV-2 tests could render a false negative or positive.
How the woman contracted the virus twice still remains a mystery. Since COVID-19 tests have a 70% accuracy rate, according to Channel 12, it seems unfathomable that she would have tested negatively twice in a row. Getting two false negative tests wouldn't explain how her symptoms went away and for a month.
This isn't the first time in Israel that a coronavirus patient was reported to have contracted the virus a second time. In late April, an 86-year-old man was hospitalized in severe condition, but was discharged after recovering from the virus and tested negative, having been deemed healthy enough to return home. The man returned to the hospital and was intubated in severe condition. He was reported to have several underlying conditions.
Israel's first case of reinfection came in February, when one of the Israeli passengers quarantined on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan tested positive a second time after returning to Israel.