Recovered coronavirus patients who tested positive again weren't infectious, Korean CDC finds

The Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released findings late Monday after studying 285 COVID-19 survivors who tested positive for the coronavirus again after presumably recovering the illness. The virus samples collected from the patients couldn't be grown in culture, suggesting that the patients had indeed recovered and were actually shedding non-infectious or dead virus particles, rather than suffering from a lingering infection, Bloomberg reports.

While there will likely be more work done in this area, it's encouraging news, and South Korean health authorities — who have received praise for setting a global standard during the pandemic — will no longer consider people infectious after they recover from their illness and won't require additional tests after patients are discharged from their isolation period. That means those patients won't have to test negative before returning to work or school.

Another positive sign from the findings is that almost all of the cases for which blood cases were taken had antibodies against the virus, which lends credence to the theory that people who were previously infected have built up some form of protection. Read more at Bloomberg.

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