Scientists from the U.S. and China found that 7 out of 38 people who retested positive for COVID-19 after hospital discharge are young ones aged under 14, SCMP reported. That makes up for 14.5%. Only one patient aged over 60 came back with a positive result.
The study was based on on a sample of 262 former patients of Shenzhen 3rd People's Hospital in Guangdong province. All the subjects were observed for around two weeks.
The study also found that only "a small number reported a mild cough and chest tightness, which was not worse than before", while none experienced a fever.
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Why are young people more likely to retest positive of coronavirus?
According to the researchers, the data seem to suggest that younger people were more likely to retest positive than those who had suffered only mild symptoms.
21 people with whom the 38 subjects had been in close contact were also tested and they all came back negative for the deadly disease.
The study, led by researchers from MIT, Southern University of Science and Technology, Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, and Shenzhen 3rd People's Hospital has not been peer-reviewed yet. It was published on Medrxv.org
In February, another research was conducted by scientists from Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, China where it returned a positive retest figure of only 3%.
Can COVID-19 recovered patients become carriers?
Nonetheless, despite their findings, researchers from the latest study said that they are not ruling out the possibility that recovered COVID-19 patients could become carriers due to the result discrepancies found with various test kits.
According to co-author Feng Zhang from MIT, they found that 18 of the 24 patients who came back with negative results through a commercial test kit called RT-PCR actually tested positive when they were subjected to more "sensitive" tests.
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