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. 2021 Jun 11:9:663045.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.663045. eCollection 2021.

Reinfection or Reactivation of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2: A Systematic Review

Xiujuan Tang  1 , Salihu S Musa  2   3 , Shi Zhao  4   5 , Daihai He  2
Affiliations

Reinfection or Reactivation of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2: A Systematic Review

Xiujuan Tang et al. Front Public Health. .

Abstract

As the pandemic continues, individuals with re-detectable positive (RP) SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA among recovered COVID-19 patients have raised public health concerns. It is imperative to investigate whether the cases with re-detectable positive (RP) SARS-CoV-2 might cause severe infection to the vulnerable population. In this work, we conducted a systematic review of recent literature to investigate reactivation and reinfection among the discharged COVID-19 patients that are found positive again. Our study, consisting more than a total of 113,715 patients, indicates that the RP-SARS-CoV-2 scenario occurs plausibly due to reactivation, reinfection, viral shedding, or testing errors. Nonetheless, we observe that previously infected individuals have significantly lower risk of being infected for the second time, indicating that reactivation or reinfection of SARS-CoV-2 likely have relatively less impact in the general population than the primary infection.

Keywords: COVID-19; pandemic; re-detectable positive; reactivation; reinfection.

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Conflict of interest statement

DH was supported by an Alibaba (China)-Hong Kong Polytechnic University Collaborative Research Project. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Flow diagram of the searching strategy and article selection process.
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