NC begins reporting COVID reinfections, but overall number of cases continues to slide
Nearly 10,700 people in North Carolina tested positive for the coronavirus over the weekend, some of them for the second time.
The data, from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, marks the first time the state’s updated case count has included people who recovered from an initial infection of coronavirus only to be infected again.
Until now, the data presented on the state’s COVID-19 dashboard counted someone who tested positive for COVID-19 as a single case, even if that person tested positive again months later.
DHHS changed that starting Monday to conform with the national definition of a COVID-19 case. The number of reinfections is folded into the overall case numbers and does not appear separately on the state’s website.
State officials said Friday that the change would increase the number of new cases reported in North Carolina. Even so, new cases continued to decline from their peak last month. The 2,219 new cases reported Monday was the fewest since early August.
Other measures also show that the summer surge of coronavirus continues to ebb. The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 on Sunday was 2,690, down from more than 3,800 a month ago.
Meanwhile, the portion of coronavirus tests that were positive was 8.4% on Saturday, the most recent date available. That’s down from as much as 14% in recent weeks, and matches the average of 8.3% over the past week.
Public health officials say their goal is a positive rate of 5%, the point at which the virus is thought to be contained.
Coronavirus reinfections rare but growing
The government defines a COVID-19 reinfection as a person who was infected with COVID-19, recovered, and then tested positive again at least 90 days after their initial positive test.
Of the more than 1.3 million confirmed coronavirus cases as of Sept. 20 in North Carolina, 10,812 were reinfections, according to DHHS. The majority of those reinfections took place since late July, when the more contagious delta variant of the virus caused a spike in cases nationwide.
The state doesn’t report how many reinfected people became sick enough to end up in a hospital, but it says 94 of them died of the disease. Overall, 16,719 people have died of COVID-19 in North Carolina as of Monday.
Reinfections among people who have had COVID-19, and even among that smaller number who have both had COVID and been vaccinated, is not a surprise, said Dr. David Wohl, an infectious disease expert at UNC Health in Chapel Hill.
“It means that there are some holes in our immunity, whether it be natural immunity or vaccine-induced immunity, that allow the virus to take again,” Wohl said. “It could mean that there’s a different variant. If you have a different variant, your immune system may not react the same way as it did to the previous variant.”
Everyone’s immune system is different, Wohl added, so some people may simply not be able to mount a response to the virus even if they have been infected already or been vaccinated — or both. Of the 10,812 people known to have become reinfected in North Carolina, 200 of them had been vaccinated, according to DHHS.
Scientists are still learning how much natural immunity people get from being infected with the coronavirus, Wohl said, so tracking the number of reinfections will be important. Scientists know more about the protection that vaccines provide against hospitalization and death from COVID-19, he said.
“People who are vaccinated do not progress very often to severe disease,” he said. “It sets the house back in order pretty quickly, and that’s what keeps people out of the hospital.”
This story was originally published October 4, 2021 at 3:21 PM.
