Here is a story from CNN via the Mercury News about 3 teachers sharing a classroom. Anecdotal, but makes me think these are signs of a lack of immunity. A positive, negative, positive test.
> A month after they caught the virus that killed their colleague, Martinez and Skillings are still struggling.
> Martinez says fatigue is lingering, she still has a cough, and she continues to take breathing treatments to relieve tightness in her chest. She recently tested negative and retested.
> Skillings says she thought she was getting better, but recently her cough returned full force. She tested a week ago and it came back positive again.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/12/three-arizona-teacher...
Now if you had a peer reviewed study to link instead of media reports, I would be very interested.
Seropositive tests have show the vast majority develop an immune response, how long that lasts we don’t know, but even if it’s only 6 months, that will reduce spread. You don’t create an epidemic plan based on edge cases.
And it’s important to note that the tests are looking for viral RNA. Viral RNA can be found even if virus are inactivated in the absence of an active infection or the shedding of active viruses.
For some viruses, like, say, HIV, you can have lots of antibodies against it, but still be sick with HIV.
It is not yet clear whether SARS-CoV-2 is like HIV in this sense or if the antibodies produced by the body after infection with the virus actually confer protection against future infections.
https://www.livescience.com/monkeys-cannot-get-reinfected-wi...
That, plus every case of supposed reinfection that has occurred so far is either inconclusive or proven to be a case of false positives. The big one was in South Korea, where the KCDC later determined that their test was picking up dead virus fragments.
It gets hard to keep pretending people can get COVID-19 over and over again. Maybe if had been documented 1000 times out of 13 million cases, but we haven't even seen anything close to that.
I work in the healthcare space, and a physician recommended this review recently published in JAMA.[1]. He felt it was probably the best summary of all the data that’s out there (>29,000 papers on Covid).
I found this particularly relevant - Although viral nucleic acid can be detectable in throat swabs for up to 6 weeks after the onset of illness, several studies suggest that viral cultures are generally negative for SARS-CoV-2 8 days after symptom onset.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768391
We do know when we do detailed antibody assays on people who are seropositive, that most have developed neutralizing antibodies
At the very least can you maintain your argument? More dangerously could be the situation in which those that are asymptomatic initially end up with shorter duration immunity than those that have symptoms. Which would toss out a lot of our understanding of how severe the virus could end up being out the door.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/7/12/21321653/getting-covid-19-twic...
As far as I know, their original claim is still true: there are zero confirmed reinfections with Covid-19.
However, I am not claiming it is strictly impossible. That has not been proven either. But at this point, we could only assume it is extremely rare, at least within a 5-6 month window.
SARS immunity lasts a few years (1-3 years I believe). On the other hand, several extant coronaviruses contribute to the common cold, and my understanding is that immunity for these is only a few months or less. This is partly why one can catch a cold multiple times in a year.