I’ve seen speculation that COVID-19 does not confer meaningful immunity, and we’ve already seen a reinfection. If true, this looks less like “we have a new winter disease” and more like “this is the new normal.”
I remain skeptical of these stories. These people are being tested with excruciatingly sensitive molecular tests after leaving severe disease in a way that is not common in other health contexts. We know that people can shed deactivated measles virus that can be detected by PCR for weeks after they recover. If I was going to guess, I would suspect that what you have is people who got a severe infection with a damaged respiratory system are then coming down with secondary complications while still shedding detectable virus, or their immune system falls apart due to severe complications allowing remnant virus to replicate up to detection levels.
It could be an indication that severe disease can produce a long lingering recovery and you’re not always out of the woods when you are getting better. But the notion of people who had managed to clear the thick hot and heavy infection getting reinfected by a few hundred viral particles from outside their body again so quickly just doesn’t sit well with me. If reinfection happened I would expect it to take years...
I’ve seen speculation that COVID-19 does not confer meaningful immunity, and we’ve already seen a reinfection. If true, this looks less like “we have a new winter disease” and more like “this is the new normal.”
I remain skeptical of these stories. These people are being tested with excruciatingly sensitive molecular tests after leaving severe disease in a way that is not common in other health contexts. We know that people can shed deactivated measles virus that can be detected by PCR for weeks after they recover. If I was going to guess, I would suspect that what you have is people who got a severe infection with a damaged respiratory system are then coming down with secondary complications while still shedding detectable virus, or their immune system falls apart due to severe complications allowing remnant virus to replicate up to detection levels.
It could be an indication that severe disease can produce a long lingering recovery and you’re not always out of the woods when you are getting better. But the notion of people who had managed to clear the thick hot and heavy infection getting reinfected by a few hundred viral particles from outside their body again so quickly just doesn’t sit well with me. If reinfection happened I would expect it to take years...