RECURRENT COVID-19 INFECTION IN RECOVERED PATIENTS (A CRITICAL REVIEW)

The pandemic of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is still grooming throughout the world. However, the number of recovered patients with COVID-19 is also increasing day by day. Some discharged patients from hospitals had shown fever and radiological abnormalities again along with positive real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). This might be due to relapse of COVID-19 in recovered patients, secondary bacterial infection, the false-positive result after discharging, or a false negative at discharging yet to determine. In this review, a total of seven studies retrieved, in which 1052 COVID-19 infected patients were studied and followed them for one to six weeks. Among 1,052 patients, 12.1% (n=127) patients were found re-infected having positive RT-PCR with different clinical samples including nasopharyngeal swab, an anal swab, throat swab, and sputum samples. All re-infected patients were found with mild to moderate clinical symptoms. These findings suggest that recurrence of COVID-19 is exist. It is important to develop diagnostic tools further to avoid the false negative or positive results. Moreover, followup studies are required to determine the reason behind the recurrence of COVID-19 in recovered. Besides, we suggest because of the current review, further management of discharged patients is crucial especially for immunocompromised patients, old age patients, or patients with comorbidities. The discharge criteria should be ensured for a recovered patient to prevent the relapse of COVID-19. Keywords: COVID-19, Discharge, Recurrence, Recovered Patients, RT-PCR