PUNE: Researchers have come across a 28-year-old male healthcare worker from a Pune-based hospital, who caught the Delta variant of coronavirus after he was previously infected with Covid-19 and was fully vaccinated thereafter.
There have been two other cases of doctors getting infected thrice with Covid. After first being infected, the Pune man had moderate levels of antibodies two weeks after recovering when he tested negative.
He took the first dose of Covishield and subsequently the second dose four weeks later. A month after receiving the second dose, he again tested positive.
Both reinfections and vaccine breakthrough infections seem to be more pronounced in healthcare workers due to their high exposure to Covid patients. The research team is from Pune-based Dr DY Patil Medical College, and CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi. The research team came across this case in April.Dr Vinod Scaria, principal scientist at CSIR-IGIB, told TOI that the Pune man’s was an extremely rare case of reinfection after a patient developed hybrid immunity following Covid infection and full vaccination.