Will those who had recovered from COVID-19 still test positive during the Spring Festival holiday? Do they need to see a doctor after testing positive again?
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a post Friday that those who test positive again generally don’t need special medical treatment. Only those patients who have symptoms again and show aggravation of symptoms need medical treatment.
According to Wu, the so-called testing positive again for COVID means that those infected with COVID, after reaching the recovery standard, have positive nucleic acid test results again when they haven’t had contact with any infectious patients during a follow-up observation period, with the possibilities of contamination and sample error excluded.
Wu said the mechanism of this phenomenon is still unclear, though there are some possible explanations.
One explanation is that the infected person’s overall immunity is weak, and the virus in the body hasn’t been completely cleared off. The second explanation is that the infected person’s local mucosal immunity is defective.
The third is that the infected person has used antiviral small-molecule chemical drugs too early, and the body’s immune response has not yet started. When the patient has negative nucleic acid test results after drug treatment and stops using the drug, the viral load that has not been cleared starts replicating again.
Wu said it is not suggested that people pay too much attention to whether they will test positive again for COVID.
Frequent nucleic acid or antigen tests are not recommended if it is clear that one had been infected with COVID, the nucleic acid test or antigen test results had turned out negative, and one no longer has any symptoms.
As to concerns about whether one will get reinfected with COVID in other provinces during cross-provincial trips, health experts said that there are possibilities but most people don’t need to worry.
Those who had been infected with COVID are likely to face two types of virus during the trips, namely the strain that they had already been infected with or similar strains, and other variant strains that are very different from the one they were infected with.
The possibility of being reinfected with the same or similar strains is low, as the body’s immune system memory can avoid reinfection for a short period of time.
For most people, the virus they’ll encounter during Spring Festival trips are the strains they’ve been infected with or similar strains because BA. 5.2 or BF. 7 are the dominant strains in the country.