A Woman Died Of COVID After Contracting 2 Variants At The Same Time, Researchers Say
NPR, By Bill Chappell, July 12, 2021.
The patient came to the hospital because she was repeatedly falling down. She was breathing fine, and her blood oxygen levels were good. But tests showed that the 90-year-old Belgian woman had COVID-19 — and not just one strain, but two variants of the virus. She died at the hospital in just five days after her respiratory system rapidly deteriorated.
"To our knowledge, this is one of the first reports of a double infection" with two coronavirus variants of concern, the researchers said.
The woman had both the alpha and beta variants of the coronavirus (which were detected first in the U.K. and South Africa, respectively), according to a paper that was presented over the weekend at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases.
- The woman was probably infected by two separate people: "Both these variants were circulating in Belgium at the time, so it is likely that the lady was co-infected with different viruses from two different people," said Anne Vankeerberghen of the OLV Hospital in Aalst, Belgium, in a news release...
Continued,
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/07/12/1015242810/belgian-woman-infected-2-covid-variants
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