Nearly 300 recovered coronavirus patients who tested positive a second time hadn’t infected others, South Korean health officials have found.
The preliminary findings, released Monday by the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, give a boost to the notion that those infected with coronavirus develop immunity to the disease.
The officials monitored 285 recovered patients who again tested positive and found that none of the 790 people they came into contact with were infected with coronavirus.
As a result, South Korea lifted quarantine requirements for discharged patients, according to the Wall Street Journal. They also swapped out the term “relapse” for “redetected” in describing patients who tested positive again.
South Korea has a total of 11,065 confirmed cases of COVID-19.
More than 470 recovered patients have tested positive a second time and health officials have questioned whether the virus may have been reactivated, as opposed to patients being reinfected.
