Health officials in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, reported over 30 cases of people being reinfected with COVID-19, according to local news station WSOC.
The county, which includes Charlotte, has recorded 34 cases where a person has documented 2 positive tests over 3 months apart, according to WSOC. The county health department excludes reinfections from its new daily totals.
“At this time, we are not aware of any deaths in an individual who meet this criteria,” officials told WSOC in an email.
“While we investigate each case at the time of the test result, we have not yet had the opportunity to fully compile and analyze the data to answer the questions: common threads, trends in symptoms, etc.,” officials said, according to WSOC. “We hope to be able to do so in the near future.”
Daily COVID-19 Update
226 more COVID-19 cases reported among County residents since yesterday. No additional deaths. In total, there have been 43,915 reported cases and 456 deaths since March.
The latest detailed data » https://t.co/PRDk3vWv7O pic.twitter.com/uJmF3RLYqc
— Mecklenburg County (@MeckCounty) December 1, 2020
The Mecklenburg County Health Department did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller’s request for comment. (RELATED: North Carolina Slated To Receive 85,000 Doses Of Pfizer Vaccine, Governor Says)
Few cases of reinfections have been documented globally, the New York Post reported. Suspected reinfections require comparisons of viral strains to determine whether a person has lasting symptoms from their first confirmed case, according to The Post.
“To prove it’s a true reinfection is kind of a high bar,” Nicole Iovine, an infectious disease expert at the UF Health, told The Post in October.
“You need the isolates from the patient so you can sequence or fingerprint them to see that they are a truly different strain,” Iovine continued.
There have been 43,915 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Mecklenburg County, according to the Mecklenburg County Health Department.