Portugal has registered more than 194,000 cases of reinfection with the coronavirus-CoV-2, which represents 4.65% of the total number of notified cases reported since June 2020, announced this Thursday to the Directorate-General for Health (DGS).

“Between June 1, 2020 and May 10, 2022, 3,982,250 new cases of Covid-19 infection were registered in BI SINAVE. Added to this value 194,244 proposed reinfection, according to the definition, that make up 4.65% of the total notifications“, advances a technical report from the DGS.

The health authority, which started to include data on SARS-2 reinfections in reports and publications monitoring the pandemic, advances that 4.65% of reinfection caused by the virus caused by Covid-19 represents a value similar to those recorded internationally.

According to the document, the prevalence of reinfection cases is more severe in the period when the Ómicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is more frequent, with a proportion of 6.10%surpassing about 2% of the period when the Delta and Alpha variants were predominant, and only 0.35% at the time of the original variant identified in Wuhan, China.

Cases registered after the last BI SINAVE – National Epidemiological Surveillance System – are considered a platform for suspected reinfection when there is a positive test 90 days after the infection episode, as defined by the World Health Organization.

Since the entry into operation of the BI SINAVE platform in 2020, the process of counting SARS-CoV-2 infection cases does not consider the system of first infection associated with each person, since it is part of the flow, based on studies populations, that reinfection phenomena were rare, between 1% and 2%.

“The emergence of the Ómicron problem variant changed the probability of reinfection, being five times more likely with reincarnation than Delta concern variant“, indicates the technical report, adding that, in order to maintain the precision and reliability of the epidemiological surveillance process, it was necessary to update the methodology for counting cases, incorporating suspicions of reinfection.

“It should be noted that the follow-up of the scenarios was always ensured through the Trace Covid-19 platform, which alerted to new positive results of laboratory tests for SARS-CoV-2, regardless of the period between them”, explaining the Directorate-General. .