BEIJING, June 18. /TASS/. Those infected with the novel coronavirus after recovery may contract it again with a high degree of possibility since many of those tested in China in the high-risk group did not have the appropriate antibodies, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported on Thursday referring to results from a study obtained by a group of American and Chinese researchers.

According to the newspaper, the scientists reached this conclusion after conducting tests for antibodies on medical personnel who participated in the liquidation of the Wuhan outbreak which was the first site of the COVID-19 infection in the world. It emerged that only 4% out of 23,000 medics tested obtained any clearly pronounced immunity, while one in four of them is susceptible to the infection, the newspaper said.

"People are unlikely to produce long-lasting protective antibodies against this virus," as one of the study’s experts was quoted in the newspaper.

Statistically, in Mainland China, 94.11% of those infected have recovered. The number of infections since December 2019 exceeded 83,200. Since April 15 the country officially had no fatalities (except the cases added as a result of correction) with the mortality rate of 5.56% (over 4,600 fatalities).

Last week in Beijing an outbreak of the disease caused by COVID-19 was registered for the first time in the past two months. The authorities undertook extremely stringent measures restricting mobility in many residential districts, introducing strict transport control as well as testing hundreds of thousands of people for the infection using nucleic acids tests. As a result, over six days 158 infections were detected in the capital as well as 15 who contracted it without symptoms.