The first person to be diagnosed with COVID-19 in India has been infected by the virus again, officials said Tuesday.
“She is reinfected with COVID-19. Her RT-PCR is positive, antigen is negative. She is asymptomatic,” Thrissur District Medical Officer Dr. K J Reena told the Press Trust Of India (PTI). She had not been vaccinated before, The Hindu reported.
Doctors found out that she was infected again when they were examining her samples as part of a medical test she took while she was preparing to head to the capital city New Delhi for education-related purposes, according to the news agency.
The young woman is at home and “she is OK,” Reena said.
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She first contracted the virus while she was a medical student at a university in Wuhan, China. After she returned home for semester break, she became India’s first COVID-19 case after she tested positive Jan. 30, 2020.
After she tested positive, she was admitted to a Thrissur hospital, where she managed to recover from the illness, the PTI reported.
With around 30.91 million infections, India has the world’s second-highest infection count, behind the U.S. (RELATED: Thousands Injected With Salt Water Instead Of COVID Vaccines In India)
The country witnessed a deadly second wave of the virus around May which killed a massive number of people across the South Asian country. Most of the country’s official 410,784 death count was caused by the second wave, Al Jazeera reported.