Hacker News Reader

Comment by therealmarv | Hacker News Reader

It's currently unknown if there is an immunity after getting Corona.

That is just not true. There were a few number of cases, where a second test was positive after initial curing. This is being investigated and can be attributed to issues with the test, false positive diagnosis in the first place or various individual reasons. There is no evidence for a fundamental issue with adapted immunity to Sars-CoV-2.

You forget something. Maybe after first curing people get immunity and can get the virus again but it does not get active and test gets positive. People can have viruses and antivirus or a non active virus without consequences and then the test will be positive.

All signs point to the coronavirus infection inducing normal immunity. The number of apparent reinfection is extraordinarily low, consistent with being due to testing error, and in any case not relevant even if real if it only applies to a small fraction of the population. Furthermore, the virus does not have a segmented genome like influenza (thought to be responsible for its rapid evolution and ability to evade vaccine) and is a single "species" (unlike the huge family of viruses, mostly rhinoviruses, that cause the unvaccinable common cold).

That's great news. Got any links to the data?

I just found some strong counter evidence in tension with everything I'd been hearing:

Francois Balloux (Computational biologist, director of UGI at UCL): "How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). If this were to be confirmed, it would add to the challenge of managing the pandemic.

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12388371671426416...

It's not inconsistent per say, since it still seems that the recent reinfections were likely due to test error or rare poor immune response, but my initial comment is misleading enough that I retract it (and would delete it if I could).

Corona viruses also have an error correction enzyme in their rna transcription so their rate of mutation is much lower than most viruses, it’s likely that both herd immunity and vaccination would be effective as a consequence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com