South Korea has reported that forty more coronavirus patients who are thought to have recovered have tested positive again, after 51 others also who had recently 'recovered' have tested positive once more this week. Health officials are now trying to calm people from feeling nervous that they can be reinfected which will cause more panic to some areas that believed they are nearing herd immunity.

The people may have not been reinfected but instead they have been 'reactivated, according to Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) in a press briefing.

South Korean epidemiologists are urgently trying to know the cause of this strange trend which first observed in 51 patients from Daegu earlier this week.

Is it reinfections or reactivation or false negatives?

It is predicted that the number will still rise as the days go by and 91 is just the beginning, according to Kim Woo-Joo, Korea University Guro Hospital professor of infectious diseases.

The patients had likely 'relapsed' rather than reinfected as early indications suggest the coronavirus may lay dormant at undetectable levels in the human cells which is likely not infectious. A fifth of all swabs return incorrect verdicts which makes false test results to be blame.

"I agree that these will not be reinfections but I do not think these will be reactivations. Personally I think the most likely explanation is that the clearance samples were false negative," said Paul Hunter, an infectious diseases professor at the University of Anglia in an interview with MailOnline.

He emphasized that a conventional coronavirus test can give the wrong result for 20 to 30 percent of the time. He also believes that the test the South Korean patients were given before being released from quarantine showed wrong results saying that they already recovered but they are still infected.

Jung Ki-suk, professor of pulmonary medicine at Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital said that there are various interpretations and a lot of variables to explain the situation. The government should come up with responses for each of these variables, he added.

Coronavirus cases in South Korea

Out of 10,450 cases that are confined in South Korea, the country reported 7,000 of it has already recovered. There are 27 new cases reported on Friday which is the lowest after daily cases peaked at more than 900 in late February. Their death rate rose by 7 to 211.

There are no new cases however in the City of Daegu, which endured the first large coronavirus outbreak outside of China. The city also accounts for more than half of South Korea's total infections with at least 6,807 confirmed cases.

In late February, the spread of infections at a church in Daegu drove a spike in cases in South Korea. Before widespread testing and social distancing was imposed on South Korea to bring the numbers down, the outbreak initially pushed the tally of confirmed cases much higher than anywhere else in China.

South Korea is still taking the pandemic seriously ahead of next week's general election as election officers wear hazmat suits while preparing the polling stations for Wednesday's ballot.

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