Getting ahead of this now: New report of bona fide #SARSCoV2 reinfection from researchers in Hong Kong University, who published in the esteemed journal known as a PRESS RELEASE. https://twitter.com/cwylilian/status/1297830744509698050

Long story short: 33-year-old who recovered from #COVID19 went to Europe and was found to test positive for #SARSCoV2 on his return to HK in a screening program. He was asymptomatic the second time around.

They sequenced the samples from both infections and were found to be different viruses. That suggests reinfection and is convincing. HOWEVER...I'd be a lot more convinced if they actually shared the data.

@cwylilian shared screen captures of the results and discussion section of the article accepted at CID, but none of the figures! So literally we have to take the article, which evidently contains data about viral loads, clinical labs, phylogeny, and seroconversion, at its word.

Looking at descriptive bits and pieces of the study makes it very difficult to evaluate the quality of the work. Instead, this is designed to make a big splash in the media and prevents independent scientists from commenting with a full picture of the actual data.

While I agree that the sequencing data they are reporting here suggests reinfection, there are a lot of questions that can't be answered with just a press release. For example:

1. The results screen capture says the patient was seronegative for anti-nucleoprotein (N) IgG 10 days after the first infection...so they never mounted an antibody response? Did they have IgG to spike? That might explain why they were reinfected.

1. (continued) If they didn't seroconvert after the first infection, then that doesn't have major implications for immunity since most people DO have IgG after recovering from infection.

2. One of the implications for immunity is that recovered patients need to be vaccinated. If the patient was seronegative after the first infection, then how would you identify COVID-19 survivors needing a vaccine?

2. (continued) If a person is seronegative and didn't have a confirmed prior positive test for virus, you can't tell if they were infected previously or not. So people with no antibodies would probably be eligible for vaccination anyway.

3. This is different from the reports of "hey my patient is probably reinfected because I think they are and their disease is worse". This patient was asymptomatic on round 2 and was identified by airport screening. So this probably matters most for transmission, and...

3. (continued) it doesn't look like they cultured live virus. So was this person shedding large amounts of infectious virus? Their viral loads were relatively high the second time around (Ct ~27), so perhaps they were. Are reinfected people likely to transmit the virus to others?

4. How many people were screened to find this single case of re-infection? There's no indication that this is anything other than a rare case of someone getting reinfected after not developing immunity to the first infection.

I could go on all day but I've got my own work to do. The bottom line is that this is compelling but it's impossible to follow up on the key questions it raises with just a press release and some screen captures of a pre-proof.

Scientists and the journalists covering these stories have a responsibility not to release findings like this in a sensationalist way, especially if they claim that there are major implications for the pandemic or a vaccine (based on n=1 with no accompanying data to examine).

ONE patient becoming reinfected does not mean that reinfection is going to occur across the board. The lack of hard data accompanying their description of the work means we can't even follow up on questions about this one case. Please STOP disseminating data by presser.

As a follow-up, @VirusesImmunity has a fantastic thread discussing the implications regarding immunity. Dr. Iwasaki also includes some terrific graphics to illustrate the immunological principles she describes so elegantly. https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1297890418168860674?s=20