The first case of a patient who has contracted both Covid 19 and dengue has been reported from Sri Lanka. According to Sri Lankan weekly ‘The Sunday Times’ the patient is a 29-year-old man who had got infected with COVID-19 at a fish market.
The Head of Negombo’s Dengue Centre, Dr. LakKumar Fernando said the patient had come to the hospital with high fever.
“We tested him for dengue through an antigen test as well as for COVID-19 through an RT-PCR test. While the dengue test came positive on the third day, the RT-PCR test results came on Day 5,” Dr. Fernando had told the Sunday Times.
As the patient is clinically stable with regard to dengue, he has been transferred to the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID).
However in a research carried out in India it was found that antibody detection-based assays can result in false-positive reports for COVID-19 for actually Dengue infected patients. The reverse scenario has been reported from Singapore, i.e. originally COVID-19 patients were mis-diagnosed as having Dengue as antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 cross-reacted in Dengue antibody tests. According to experts it is evident that these two viruses can cross react much often and can result problems in serological diagnosis tests.
