Lasting immunity found after recovery from Covid-19
nih.gov
nih.gov
> For travellers who have recovered from the virus: date of the positive test result, an issuer of the certificate, date of issuance, validity date
The bureaucratic stumbling block will be agreement on antibody and T-cell testing definitions across country borders.
The travel pass is a horrible idea, that effectively will force many to be vaccinated.
That should not be the european way.
I ask this as I understand your concern about politics forcing personal decisions, yet I am not finding a pragmatic workable solution to the current crisis.
You can use UK to gauge how the Covid situation will become and i dont think anyone will say there is a crisis now. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
And "random" it might be as much as 50% of the passing cars.
At least in Italy, movement was restricted inside regions (sometimes provinces) of the same country due to the epidemy.
It's not nice for anyone involved, but the primary goal is to stop/limit the contagion. I'm an expat, so it goes against one of my interests, but I'm in favor of limiting border crossings, unless you can show that you won't spread COVID around.
So I think in this case (we are in a global pandemic) it makes sense to see freedom of movement not in a binary way (yes/no) but more in shades: allow more movement of more people as we get better at containing the pandemic.
Also please note EU is not a federal state, nor many of the founding members want that to be. So countries have a lot of power to decide how to handle pandemic. Still I think EU as a block did a good job negotiating vaccines in the context of not having a unity or a fast decision process.
So while I don't agree with restricting rights, I also don't agree with restricting rights of people who can move (like the ones vaccinated or immunised naturally) just because everybody cannot do it (cannot get vaccinated for personal or medical reasons).
As far as I can see the vaccination rhythm is decreasing in some countries and it is not even approaching 50% of population. It might be because of the back and forth with Astra Zeneca the EU did or it might be because EU is pretty big as in diverse with respect of culture, set of beliefs, approach to health …
Anyhow everyone is demanding EU to do something so their response will not be “wait so that everybody wants to be vaccinated”. Also because being that big means that heard immunity will not be reached.
If you don’t want to take measures to protect others, you can sit home for a while. It won’t kill you, and it won’t kill the people around you.
Or are you arguing that the vaccines don't work?
Is it? Far fewer of them still will get severe symptoms. And this of course requires the unvaccinated person to actually be infected. From what I read, my risk (of at least an unpleasant time) is worse if that person had some other virus instead, since I'm much more likely to catch it and guaranteed to have unpleasant symptoms if so. At some point there needs to be a cutoff in risk level where it's low enough for a free society.
A bigger concern in my mind is that as long as the virus is spreading it is mutating, potentially becoming dangerous again to the vaccinated too. But this seems to be increasingly not likely with this particular category of viruses.
You must be trolling, no way you're so self-centered.
"I like to drive with 200km/h through cities, those who don't like it or are scared of my driving can stay home"
"I like to take my aggressive pitbull for a walk without a leash, if you don't like it you can stay home"
"I like to play with guns, if you don't like me handling guns in public you can stay home"
It's all recklessness, and of course not acceptable. You know what's the better solution for those 100 vaccinated people? To force you to stay at home. Because they're 100, and you're 1. It's not the whole world that needs to adapt to you, it's the other way around.
Self-centered? The people demanding the nonvaccinated cease existing in society because of their fears are the selfish ones. I'm saying nothing about anyone else's choices or activities whatsoever. Restricting someone else's behavior and bodily autonomy is the selfish act.
100 people forcibly removing 1 person from society who has done nothing wrong? That's a concentration camp. This is mob rule, you're just okay with it because you're part of the mob.
If it bothers enough people, you can't do it. Call it law, call it mob rule, call it whatever you wish - it's just how the world works.
And the 100 vs 1 argument is very poorly thought out; we have just had a year of people shut in their homes for the sake of the few who were at risk. For the argument to suddenly swing on its axis, it would strongly suggest an authoritarian thrilled at the opportunity to exercise their will on others.
Your right to not be vaccinated does not trump public health concerns, or shouldn't.
Note however that we still don't know exactly what long-term consequences Covid19 may have, so even with this, if we can avoid infecting young children, we should.
There is even a ECHR decision to this effect.
How is limiting state power during a particular emergency situation a terrible precedent? The state can always grab more power at a later emergency, as history has shown. The difficult task is getting them to give up power once it is no longer needed for the emergency.
This isn't rocket science. I don't know where people get this idea that international travel was some kind of libertarian utopia before covid. There are a lot of things that restrict your ability to travel, and vaccinations are one of the least problematic.
You are obviously not referring to the EU, where, within Schengen, international travel was a libertarian utopia and one of the main reasons this bureaucratic construct had so many supporters despite the downsides.
For, and only for, EU citizens. Which is a good start at utopianising travel, but not complete.
Seems like you had to follow rules regulations when travelling before, so explain to me what is the exact difference now?
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/designated-civil-surgeons/vaccin...
Immigration to the U.S. is of course, a regulated activity. They can make you take a physical, pay a fee, inspect your background, call your mom and make sure you're a good person, etc, before accepting you as an immigrant. Sure. There's no limits to that, because there's no U.S. Constitutional protection for non-U.S. citizens and immigration can be stopped altogether if desired (assuming it's enforced).
The fourteenth amendment plainly says “people” not citizens. There are others, but this is the most obvious one.
> nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
But this kind of arguments are precisely the point when it comes to concern about precedents. It becomes less of a barrier to adding new rules just because the law already has vaguely similar rules.
https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/networks/europe...
All rights have limitations of course.
Agree, let's not be reckless–restricting movement for public health only has over seven hundred years of precedent [1].
Good. It’s not like a concentration camp. There are other options if you don’t want to vaccinate.
You can just stay at home (I’ve been declined Schengen visa in the past for no reason), you can get PCR-tested. You also can get ill with Covid and then recover (hopefully).
>(CBS) — The largest biotech firm in the world wasted no time in offering to build and run COVID testing labs in Washington, contacting its governor right after the first major COVID outbreak in the U.S. occurred there. The Chinese company, the BGI Group, made the same offer to at least five other states, including New York and California, 60 Minutes has learned. This, along with other COVID testing offers by BGI, so worried Bill Evanina, then the country’s top counterintelligence officer, that he authorized a rare public warning. “Foreign powers can collect, store and exploit biometric information from COVID tests” declared the notice. Evanina believes the Chinese are trying to collect Americans’ DNA to win a race to control the world’s biodata.
https://www.klfy.com/national/u-s-intelligence-officials-say...
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bill-gates-china-23m...
>China's push to control Americans' health care future: U.S. officials say the Chinese government is trying to collect Americans' DNA, and they believe a recent offer from a Chinese company for assistance in COVID-19 testing was suspicious. Jon Wertheim reports.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biodata-dna-china-collection-60...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/02/china-bgi...
If you’re afraid of getting your DNA sequenced while doing PCR test, please read up on the process of test, equipment, materials and costs involved.
>"I haven't bothered to read, but I'm dismissing it as a conspiracy theory"
I hope you can appreciate the problems with that reasoning.
Yes, there are costs involved in data collection. If the data is valuable, organizations will foot those costs. We've seen this in the tech sphere. Why is it hard to imagine it in the health/biosecurity realm?
> ... that effectively will force many to be vaccinated.
Yup, that’s the point.
No man is an island. You already can’t walk around doing literally whatever you want just because it’s your body you’re doing it with. You depend on other people, and other people depend on you (or at least can’t avoid intermingling with you, especially if you decide to travel internationally). Those who don’t get vaccinated slow down our recovery from the pandemic, putting other people’s health and lives at risk. Society has to make these trade-offs, and this one seems very reasonable to me.
I'm pretty much a high-modernist when it comes to vaccines - I think that having governments build sewage and create vaccines go into the same category of "damn useful for civilization". But it does involve curtailing liberties, and I just can't put it in a "fell good" category.
If you don’t want to be vaccinated or pay your taxes, you are, on some level, a danger to society.
Isn't is possible for someone to stab you? So in theory you could have some small degree of worry about your safety. Different people have different places they draw the line for an acceptable amount of worry vs an acceptable amount of freedom restrictions.
In (most of) the EU, it’s illegal to carry a weapon of any kind unless you have a reason to do so (ie, going hunting). You can’t even carry pepper spray.
To take it to the extreme, the law could force you to live in a little cell locked away from everyone. This would prevent you from being stabbed by someone else (except one of the guards).
Like I said, there's a tradeoff between security and freedom.
(As opposed to gun control.)
Use of it should constitute assault, which gets turned into legitimate self defense in various situations, just as if you were hitting someone.
Some of those bans and laws are just reasons to jail or fine people and do not in particular help with safety. After all, anyone can have a knife or martial arts on them anywhere for legitimate reasons, and you better have means to defend against these.
Requiring vaccination is "curtailing liberties".
Restricting movement due not being vaccinated is "curtailing liberties".
No shit. One can either be part of society or not. Society has minimum requirements if one wants to participate. One is free—exercise their liberty—to live as a hermit if they don't want to do either of these things. That's the price of admission of getting the benefits, whatever they may be, of interacting with other people. Added bonus, the rest of us don't need to hear about hermits complaining about their liberties then too.
Building sewage management infrastructure is not curtailing liberties. There is very little noise made about having to give up liberties because of the majority of other public works. Civilization decided that shitting on the sidewalk is not something that should be encouraged or condoned, so here we are with our sewage management infrastructure. We gain the freedom of not having to dig a hole and maintain an outhouse.
No one is giving up any "liberties" by getting vaccinated, but it's more likely they are acquiring liberties by getting vaccinated. At the very least it's the liberty of reducing the risk of dying.
This is all a "I don't want to do what you said I should do purely because you said it". Fine. The rest of us are at liberty to exclude or chastise these people.
One dose of the Pfizer vaccine costs €16, while AstraZeneca's is less than €3. This is affordable by any measure.
The cost of Pfizer is a lot more than the per shot cost, you need highly specialised storage and distribution due to the low temperature requirements.
I had Astra, so did several people from my social circle. Hell, some took JJ being aware of its level of effectiveness.
The vaccines need to be stored at a low temperature - that's it. I doubt it adds more than €1 to the price.
It's not a negligible cost but it's far from highly specialized.
Before mixing, the vaccine may be stored in an ultra-cold freezer between -80°C and -60°C (-112°F and -76°F). Vaccine may be stored until the expiration date.
Before mixing, the vaccine may be stored in the freezer between -25°C and -15°C (-13°F to 5°F) for up to 2 weeks. The total time vials are stored at these temperatures should be tracked and should not exceed 2 weeks.
So once they reach their destination they can be put in a normal freezer, which in turn are abundant and cheap.
FWIW, it is not feasible to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 anyway since it can survive in certain types of animals as well. All the germs we eradicated thus far were limited to human hosts.
(Source: A German podcast that interviews professors of virology every week.)
Society already excludes many people due to expensive housing, education etc... Living as hermit in a van is not that bad. But society should not expect taxes from excluded people :)
You make it sound as if there is a fixed, god given set of rules for society. That's not the case. Societies rules are constantly being negotiated by society.
So your argument is not an argument at all. It boils down to "you have to follow the rules because you have to follow the rules".
But negotiation often isn't occurring in good faith. There's way too much flat-earth- holocaust-denial- style arguments from those who "just don't want to be told what to do". Getting vaccinated doesn't take away someone's liberties; "I don't want to be told what to do" is not an argument against vaccination. Many of these people are just making noise, and it's getting old.
I'm not saying there aren't good arguments for not getting vaccinated, but it falls flat when those same people got vaccinated in order to attend public school or have state issued IDs or use passports or will bitch about a loved one dying because they failed to get vaccinated.
This style of dialogue is not welcome here. Try Reddit.
Let's try and keep it that way.
> There's way too much flat-earth- holocaust-denial- style arguments from those who "just don't want to be told what to do".
This is how you want the discourse to look like? Somebody puts an argument, and gets labeled flat earther.
Do you know Gell Mann amnesia? I shared an article the other day on facebook and got it flagged as "out of context". As it happens, it was something not out of context, just slightly against the mainstream. What do you think this did to my confidence in the mainstream?
And before you say that my article must have been wrong, let me remind you that the mainstream was against wearing masks 12 months ago. Hell, CDC was against wearing ffp2 masks... I don't know, 3 months ago?
Civil discourse and tone are much more important long term than just winning conversation points. Sure, go for points if you want. But every time you say things like "flat earth", you take a small chip out of the boat we're all in.
I think society has opinions and ideas that evolve into ethics and morals that are represented in laws.
It’s not a secret. In this case, rights are curtailed to require vaccines. This is deemed acceptable. If you don’t like it, convince your country mates to change their mind. Or move to a country that feels differently. Or move to the wilderness.
I think it also varies from country to country as it varies quite a bit.
As a person waiting to get his booster shot next week, I find this quite concerning. Those liberties we had and were taken away from us. Nobody cares about people dying. I am sitting now next to my mom who 1 month ago was diagnosed with terminal secondary cancer after all her check-ups were cancelled last year. So yeah, nobody gives a damn about anything else than seeming virtuos and better than others online. But no one cares any more about any other diseases or other people that are suffering, it’s all social signaling for the rich and well off people to show how moral they are, all while their lifestyle is supported by those that can’t afford to have any liberties.
It's not about saving lifes, it's about getting re-elected.
This is exactly the kind of tone and comment I was speaking against. I am _pro_ vaccinations, I am _pro_ making them soft-mandatory, I was even pro other restrictions back before vaccines. All I said, in a rather moderate tone, is that I disagree with being happy about the downsides. Somehow in the kind of comments I'm speaking against, yours included, I don't see happiness that we're getting vaccinated per se. I don't see "yey, poeple won't be dying any more". I see a lot of "chastise these people".
I also see quite a lot of scare quotes and misrepresentation. I didn't say sewage was a restriction - I gave it as positive example. I didn't say (WHO would even say that?) that getting a vaccine is giving up liberties. That's stupid, really, it doesn't even make sense. I will say that not being able to do stuff without being vaccinated is a restriction. A worthy one, yes, and one I totally agree with, but by god, how can you even try to spin ... I'm not even sure what you're trying to spin, because the more I read your comment the more I realize it's just appeal to emotion and void of content.
Are you free to rant against categories of people? Yes. I just said it's not a nice thing to do, is all.
Looking at social media it feels like too many people are celebrating because they've been given another opportunity to show how virtuous they are. They're not one of those people that oppose vaccines and progress, oh no. The clout associated with putting up pictures of you with a needle in your arm is probably the most off-putting thing I'd gotten to gawk at.
My assessment is similar to yours. The situation just kinda is. We've had a novel viral agent, what followed is what you'd expect of a society that optimised for lack of novel viral agents. Now the viral agent is mostly gone and we have two new taxes to show for it: further encumberement of civil liberties and more revenue for the pharmaceutical industry.
It's not a bad result but there's no big win to point at either
It contained a few key words/ideas, so it became immediately polarized. I guess given enough years we'll become inoculated against such failure modes, but meanwhile, it is what it is.
Also, I bet you're vaccinated against polio. Do people feel their freedom has been limited because of being vaccinated against polio?
I don't understand.
If we know that people who recovered from covid are effectively as if they were vaccinated, why do they have to wait until they have the privilege to be in the lucky age group to receive the vaccine before they can go visit a loved one they don't see for more than one year?
Are you assuming that everyone in the world is living in a privileged country where people as young as 30 can already access vaccines?
I read a lot from Americans complaining how bad their country was and all that, but hey, all my American coworkers got vaccinated and I can't visit my mom in Switzerland because she aged 68 just got her first shot yesterday. That's right, Switzerland not some third world country. Switzerland with all its pharma industry can't get the same vaccine production capacity and rollout throughput as your "utterly unorganized federal state that totally botched covid", as I often read Americans.
This is about what other countries want to restrict in terms of non-citizen's entering the country without isolation.
These are countries which have had a significant portion of their economy shut down for more than a year, so unsurprisingly they might want to ensure non-citizens who travel in have done something to limit the risk (even if that is isolating for 2 weeks).
You may say "ok, we don't have yet the beurocratic apparatus to accept natural immunity in our protocols and for the time being we're going to focus on vaccinated people, sorry".
You may not say "we want to force you to vaccinate, that's the whole point, duh"
That's a dangerous attitude. It feeds vaccine skeptics or denialists, who use this attitude as a proof that there is as much dogma in the "official scientific community" who are in big pharma's pockets. They are a bunch of nuts, but they are infecting otherwise reasonable people I know all around me.
Let's avoid setting up official policies and discourse tones which effective feed the trolls.
They are only going to let people in they want, and they don't want people who could spread the virus, or bring it in.
Besides they are allowing people in with natural immunity too - as defined by a positive antibody test.
(But it should be noted that many states are not doing as well)
There are also many diverse ways the individual states have handled restrictions, it will be interesting to see if some consensus will be reached regarding keeping restrictions or not.
However, getting vaccinated should also help reduce the transmission of the disease to people who haven't yet had a chance to get a vaccination even though they could; the pandemic will end faster than if you let it run its natural course.
"An unvaccinated worker set off an outbreak at a U.S. nursing home where most residents were immunized." One vaccinated resident died.
https://www.businessinsider.com/kentucky-nursing-home-unvacc...
Some takeaways:
* Elderly, especially with underlying illnesses should be vaccinated.
* One vaccinated elderly person died, though there are not many details in the article.
* 90% or 74 out of 83 residents were vaccinated.
There may be a few people who can not be vaccinated (old and very sick), but it hardly seems appropriate to restrict billions of people just to protect those few. It would be more efficient to isolate them, which most of them probably already are (in care homes or hospitals).
Requiring certain vaccines for travel has been something that has existed for decades and was never controversial.
Also the comparison with other vaccines does not automatically make sense. All vaccines are not the same. At least in my country, so far recommendations for vaccinations had been "conservative" to only vaccinate against things that seem especially risky. There is a reason why people are not simply being vaccinated against all possible diseases.
Well then good news, COVID-19 is "especially risky".
In any case, yes, both disease and vaccination have risks, that should be weighed against each other. Matters are complicated because risks differ among different age groups.
We mandate that people take all kinds of minor risks in life; that’s always been part of being in a society.
The reason vaccine advice is conservative is because anti-intellectualism and belief in conspiracy theories has gone off the charts and politicians now have to coddle these people. It’s a collective mental illness.
Scale and proportion is the reason. 7 per 1,000,000 risk of blood clotting if you are a woman between 18-49 (and basically no risk if you're a man or outside that range, or use one of the vaccines that have not shown this risk). This is on the level of shark attacks and getting hit by lightning. Actually getting COVID has more serious risks and a much higher rate of being affected by them.
We regularly ask of citizens to do things that have a 7 per 1,000,000 risk of injury; it's a reasonable ask.
What other risky things to we ask citizens to do, exactly? People certainly choose to do other risky things. But how many are mandated?
Anyway, I'm done feeding a troll account created today.
My family is vaccinated, but I don't see why this should be forced on people. Anaphylaxis and Thrombosis are rare reported conditions after vaccination - some even causing deaths. Vaccination should be a choice.
I know people who travel regularly and no one says anything to them. No quarantine, nothing. Most people on the streets here in Germany give zero fucks, groups of 5-10, no masks (even though there's a curfew between 10pm-5am due to an increase in cases).
And I traveled all the way from Moldova to Germany by car. No one, and I mean no one ever asked for a Covid test (which I had, of course, along with a positive antibodies test). Border guards, Hungarian border patrol, German Zoll, regular Romanian and German police, they cared about what's in the bags, didn't even mention Covid.
Hungarian border guards wanted to see a German work contract for whatever asinine reason, but I repeat, none of them ever asked for a Covid test or to at least keep the mask on (they need to see your face when checking the passport).
Whatever bureaucratic stumbling blocks there are, they have nothing to do with reality, it seems.
I've traveled 2 times now by air from NYC -> London during Covid.
Last year, a 14 day quarantine on both sides, and on the NYC side, a phone call everyday to make sure I was quarantining.
This year on the London side, a 10 day quarantine, 1 negative test before flying, and 2 at home tests while quarantining, with a phone call everyday to confirm. I also got hassled at the airport because I didn't print out the day 2 and 8 receipt, just included the code on my passenger locator form under penalty of perjury.
So, the UK by air does care I suspect because of the increased exposure risk.
I traveled in the opposite direction (more or less: Vienna to Bucarest) more than 3 months ago and wasn't asked either, but on the Hungary-Romania border, they put me in a tiny room (1/3 shipping container or so) with ca. 10 people and gave me quarantine papers. They didn't check bags.
I'm pretty sure they'd check for a test or vaccination now on the way back, I'm not eager to find out and will stay here in the Covid exile for a little longer.
From the linked article:
>For travellers who have recovered from the virus: date of the positive test result, an issuer of the certificate, date of issuance, validity date
EU Travel Pass doesn't care about your antibodies.
Hmm, you are right :(
The rules are still evolving. They will need to care, since the people who recovered after a positive test are much fewer than people who recovered without being tested.
From https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
> The period of relevance of certificates depends on scientific evidence and will be determined by the verifiers following their national rules. As new scientific evidence is emerging, the periods for which certificates are relevant for waiver of applicable public health requirements could be adjusted ...The regulation also introduces some basic principles, for example, setting the maximum validity period of the certificate of recovery at 180 days. These principles could be adjusted by the Commission through delegated acts to align with new scientific evidence once it is available.
Going strictly by the text above, what would happen to the recovered people after 180 days? If they have immunity they cannot get another positive test, so no recovery certificate and no travel? Or if you already recovered more than 6 months ago, you cannot travel?
It will come down to some metric of immunity, which is apparently "TBD" but will almost immediately be a concern, as all stakeholders look more closely at the rules, logic and implications.
The EU and many western governments are not dictatorships, relying on human judgement to enforce policy. If proposed policies fail basic checks of reason and fairness, humans at border checkpoints can exercise judgement. If and when policy makers find their policy is not enforceable, they can improve the policy until it is supported by science, citizens and enforcers.
The travel industry expects these passes to bring their customers back. They will not sit quietly while their recovered/immune customers are blocked by incompetent bureaucracy from spending money across the EU, without a substantive scientific case.
At most, they could insist that recovered people continue to get PCR tested: either you're negative and free to travel, or it will be a false positive, then you wait two (?) weeks and get a magical DHCP lease for 6-month "recovery certificate".
That would equate to a PCR-test industry tax on travel, which opens up several avenues for legal/policy challenge, e.g. test types, costs, subsidies, profit margins, supply chain ownership, benefits, numerical parameters, equipment calibration, performance (false positives/negatives).
Ludicrous rules don't punish people (who find workarounds), they decrease state power and credibility, reducing compliance with other, sensible, regulations. Sanity will eventually prevail, as long as citizens hold all policy proposals to high standards of transparency, reason and science.
Airplanes and hotels and tourist-destination cities want their customers back, and they will advocate on their behalf. The key is to avoid fights about specific interventions (like decade-old vaccines) and focus on laws (including liability) developed over centuries, and immune systems battle-tested even longer than laws.
With billions of dollars at stake on multiple sides of proposed policy, there is sufficient financial incentive to study very closely the mechanisms of both natural and artificial immunity.
Policy makers can selectively highlight or ignore science, but not forever. In the US, some early policies were overturned by later court rulings, as data became available for lawsuits.
Could you provide a source for this please?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z
Asking for a citation for something so trivially discoverable is a weird flex.
Citations are cool!
However, the bane of my existence the last year have been people with strong opinions on “the science” on both sides that use “citation please” as a passive aggressive dismissal from a position of ignorance, and will promptly ignore any citations offered. The Internet is rife with it, and I generally avoid these kinds of discussions.
That may not have been the OP’s intent but I was admittedly playing the overwhelming odds. People that genuinely want to know these things can easily find and access most of the primary sources (some government research is non-public). That’s the best source for all information on COVID, the media has done a terrible job representing it. I didn’t have the above citation ready, I googled it and it came up right near the top.
Nature is a reputable publication.
I think this boils down to internet folks assuming their conversational partner has the same level of knowledge they do, don't believe the other party, and then ask for proof, rather than educate themselves. The citation was trivial to produce.
"Citation needed," and it's cousins should be reserved for things that aren't easy to find. This is just embarrassing.
I don't know why you think that's obvious. In fact, I wouldn't have expected that query to yield anything relevant, so I wouldn't have even thought to try it. That's what "knows what to search for" means, it doesn't strictly mean "coming up with obscure jargon keywords".
This is HN, so I think we can expect people know how to search google.
If someone is asking for citations in bad faith, they probably have "educated themselves" already, just with the wrong education. If someone believes a conspiracy, and they "educate themselves" as you propose, they will probably come to believe even more strongly in the conspiracies.
Half the time people ask for citations they probably believe the claim and just want more confirmation. If I ask for citation it's often because I want the authors personal opinion on what sources are good. I don't want to Google, I want to discuss things with people, that's why I'm in a comment section. And, of course, being a comment section sometimes people just stop talking, whether intentionally or not.
I don't like to see people who ask for sources be treated as though they're the bad guys. I'd rather see more focus on sources than less. If you don't want to be asked for sources say "I think...", but don't be upset if you say "studies have shown..." and somebody asks what studies you're referring to.
But this isn't what happened. It wasn't "help me to find good articles on the topics like these" it was "citation needed." In fact, I don't think I have EVER seen anyone ask how to find reputable publications on a certain topic.
I also like sources, and when I'm saying things that have provable claims, I like to back them up. Still, what I DON'T go into the comments for is a long list of people going "citation needed!" I come for interesting debate and perspectives. But that's not what i'm getting—i'm getting people disagreeing with each other by putting the onus on the other party.
* what keywords to search for
* how to quickly judge the reputation of a result
* how to assess the relevance of a result
Some of us don’t know any of the above.
This is trivially discoverable. Claiming that finding this information was not trivial appear dinhonest to me.
'That's an interesting assertion but I couldn't find anything backing it up searching for "SARS immunity 20 years" or "long lasting SARS immunity", do you have a cite I could read?'
Even showing you've put in even the teensiest bit of effort makes people much more charitable about helping you.
How much effort do I spend assessing whether I believe this research paper? It's probably not what the OP had in mind since it conflicts with what they were saying. Do I make arguments from this paper (either for or against the OP's claim)? Again, it's probably not even what they were referring too.
I know just asking for a source is low effort, but it often seems like the best starting point.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
That shows that there's clearly some memory in the immune system, but it isn't like they did challenge testing with live SARS-CoV-1 virus to survivors to see if they got sick or not.
And we now know that the presence of a T-cell immune reaction is not sufficient to prevent you from getting sick or hospitalized. The cross-reactive T-cell responses between previously circulating human coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 was found to simply not be protective at all against disease:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/10/do...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
So the paper on T-cell responses in SARS-CoV-1 patients 17 years later is not remotely as meaningful as some people suggest. It doesn't prove anything about disease or reinfection.
At the same time the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 actually is likely to be durable for many years as has been seen with HCoV-229E:
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...
What the researchers there found is solid evidence that our immunity to HCoVs doesn't wane but that the virus mutates in order to reinfect. That contradicts some other studies which seem to show reinfection of ordinary coronaviruses on short timescales, but the methdology of that study seems to be more sound. That's the one that I'd cite as evidence of durable multi-year disease-preventing immunity. Although the catch is that given this viruses ability to mutate in multiple locations around the spike protein while actually increasing affinity it seems very likely that it'll eventually mutate to achieve immune escape. It is looking like it'd be pretty surprising for this to be a one-and-done like measles.
I'm using the example of the cross-reactive immune response from other human coronavirus to SARS2, and the lack of any protection conferred by that immune response towards prevention of disease or hospitalization to be a counter example to the idea that the ex vivo immune response is necessarily predictive of useful infection/disease/hospitalization prevention.
We can't say that the spike in IFN gamma correlates to disease protection 20 years later, there's a lot of dots to fill in.
There's a big difference between an immunologists definition of "immune response" and the public's definition of "survivor island" style bulletproof "immunity".
We know the body still recognizes SARS1 17 years later. We have no idea if that person would get infected if they had dinner with someone who had SARS1. They'd probably do better than an otherwise naive person, and i wouldn't bet against that, but a T-cell response in a dish in a lab, that isn't even neutralizing, is weak evidence of an immune response.
> The results provide hope that people receiving SARS-CoV-2 vaccines will develop similar lasting immune memories after vaccination.
ie, if the opposite was true — vaccination did not provide the same strength of immunity as infection — no epidemiologist would ever state this publicly.
So I'll be happy if it's true, but this statement doesn't move my belief-meter one way or another.
Here’s an article in today’s New York Times just to pluck one of dozens of data points out of the air. To the extent that the amateur game theory, vulgar p-fishing, and playing of telephone that is public health qualifies as a science, it is the most dismal. Rather than communicate the truth about unknowns, or maybe even be curious about the data that they were basing the guidance to mask outdoors on, the CDC scores another own-goal by seemingly misreporting the threat of ourdoor transmission by 3 orders of magnitude.
> Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.
…
> In one study, 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites.
> This obviously doesn’t make much sense. It instead appears to be a misunderstanding that resembles the childhood game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled as it passes from one person to the next.
> The Singapore data originally comes from a government database there. That database does not categorize the construction-site cases as outdoor transmission, Yap Wei Qiang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, told my colleague Shashank Bengali. “We didn’t classify it according to outdoors or indoors,” Yap said. “It could have been workplace transmission where it happens outdoors at the site, or it could also have happened indoors within the construction site.”
This sort of institutional negligence makes the Challenger o-ring disaster look like a paragon of careful professional judgement. Intelligent reporters with an ounce of capacity for independent thought like Zeynep Tufecki are able to get up to speed on the subject and single-handedly provide better guidance than the entire CDC. An institution that can put out false information and bad guidance with all the attendant psychological, political, and economic costs, where no one lifts their hand to argue against the group think is broken at a deep level.
If I sound frustrated it’s because we do need a credible source of information and the CDC should provide that. Every time they do stuff like this they lose more institutional credibility. Instead we get more conspiracy theories in every direction. Even worse state and local governments make policy based on CDC guidance that mis-measures risk and results in worse spread of the virus. See for instance California’s sudden decision to halt outdoor dining which many have argued caused people to substitute a low risk activity for a higher risk activity (meeting anyway, but indoors at someone’s house) potentially resulting in a surge of cases.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-tr...
* “2 weeks to slow the spread, then this will all be over”
Fauci and the CDC were the ones who told Trump in January to ban travel, if you didn’t know. Fauci spoke in public in January 30, 2020 in favor of the ban.
Trump claimed many months later the opposite but he is a known liar.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-china-restrictions/
“ According to a March 2020 Wall Street Journal article, it was HHS health officials (including Fauci) who had to convince Trump to agree to the China travel ban, not the other way around:”
> 2 weeks to slow the spread, then this will all be over”
Unclear why you put this in quotes. This was the message from certain politicians like Trump, but it was never said by anyone who would typically be called an expert.
https://www.fumento.com/articles/erosion-of-trust-10-things-...
Fauci was also notoriously resistant to coming around on the evidence around aerosol spread.
He's been wrong about a lot of things and its usually most evident after the fact but I'm sure THIS time he is prescient instead of completely full of it unlike with every other major issue he's taken a stand on.
The 5-sigma approach used in physics is science. The “no evidence of human-to-human transmission” used by the WHO isn’t science.
You've misquoted them, for starters. The actual quote is "no clear evidence", and they make it clear it's based on what data they had from China at that point. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline
Same day:
> WHO held a press briefing during which it stated that, based on experience with respiratory pathogens, the potential for human-to-human transmission in the 41 confirmed cases in the People’s Republic of China existed: “it is certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission”.
> WHO tweeted that preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities had found “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”. In its risk assessment, WHO said additional investigation was “needed to ascertain the presence of human-to-human transmission, modes of transmission, common source of exposure and the presence of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases that are undetected”.
Five days later:
> The WHO Western Pacific Regional Office (WHO/WPRO) tweeted that, according to the latest information received and WHO analysis, there was evidence of limited human-to-human transmission.
"The 5-sigma approach used in physics is science."
So is the process used to get to a five-sigma result. Hypothesis, data gathering, analysis, etc. Like the WHO was having to do back in January of 2020.
Taiwanese scientists had observed evidence of human-to-human transmission and submitted it to the WHO well before that and they ignored it. Positive evidence of human-to-human transmission had also been reported in Thailand.
See Zeynep Tufecki’s Account of the timeline from last April.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/...
> Hong Kong and Taiwan remembered that China has a history of covering up epidemics. In 2003, the world didn’t learn about SARS until after it had escaped China and become impossible to deny. (Back then, the WHO openly criticized China for its lack of transparency and cover-up, and we contained the epidemic just in the nick of time.) This time, the WHO was told the truth early on: Taiwanese health authorities sent their own medical teams to Wuhan in December. Those scientists confirmed human-to-human transmission—the most crucial piece of information for determining the difference between a local tragedy (if viruses are only jumping from infected bats or pangolins to humans in wildlife markets where people interact directly with them) and a brewing global pandemic. Taiwan isn’t allowed to be a member of the WHO, because of China’s objections, but it still informed the organization. Hong Kong health authorities, too, announced as early as January 4 that they suspected human-to-human transmission was already occurring, as they also looked at the evidence and their own contacts in Wuhan.
Trump was utterly wrong 95% of the time. His misinformation led people to die lol!
It’s unfortunate that we were worried about consumers buying all the medical masks but in March 2020, it was a legitimate concern
I believe that competent leadership could have rallied the public to the cause of reserving PPE for hospitals for a month. Even if you don't believe in the basic nobility of the common person, congress could easily have passed emergency confiscatory legislation to pull all PPE off consumer markets without public health officials knowingly misrepresenting the truth.
Trust in institutions was already low at the start of this, and the sort of misdirection that a series of supposedly noble lies has evinced has taken it to a new low and left us where we are now.
Because vaccines work.
Where it goes wrong is if said country begins to deny participation in society, by for example requiring continuous testing for those who are not vaccinated. These measures in reality decreases your ability to participate.
Israel is one example where their Green Pass system denies you access if you dont have the green pass: https://corona.health.gov.il/en/directives/green-pass-info/
While Texas among other US states has the complete opposite approach: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/06/texas-greg-abbott-co...
And the EU is somewhere in the middle, though it does consider limiting free movement if you are not vaccinated. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_...
I much prefer the American approach, as the other approaches force the individual to be vaccinated.
Serious question: How can we possibly know this? I'm all for vaccinations (I'm going in for my second shot this weekend), but I just worry about commentary backed by intuition that doesn't carry sufficient disclaiming.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-modern...
The read on that is that immune escape should come at a cost to fitness and less virulence and transmissibility. The virus will have to "pay" with fitness in order to buy stealth.
At the same time though there have very obviously been multiple different mutations on the spike protein which have enhanced binding / viral load / transmissibility / virulence. So the virus clearly has some room to maneuver in that space.
This actually makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for sharing and correcting my line of thinking on it.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-02-24/coronavirus... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.14.21251715v
I am not seeing evidence of this from the source you provided. It only mentions that natural infection "produces variable antibody longevity and may induce robust memory B-cell responses despite low plasma neutralizing activity."
Does that mean that a natural immunity may offer protection against other coronaviruses that have a different spike protein structure? The logic being that the less targeted defenses built through a natural immunity would latch onto some other commonality?
If a new variant with a different spike emerges, I guess we'll call it SARS-CoV-3 and produce a new mRNA vaccine for it.
Protection of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection is similar to that of BNT162b2 vaccine protection: A three-month nationwide experience from Israel https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.20.21255670v...
No, it wasn’t.
The consensus was that it was uncertain the degree and duration of immunity conferred because the available evidence was insufficient and contradictory.
As in, our immune systems work more or less like we’ve thought for decades?
Lockdowns were (and are) worth it.
It's not at all clear that lockdowns were worth it, but I wouldn't say it's obvious in either direction.
Rather, we have been conducting a grand experiment on society, far different than our reaction to other similar diseases in which there was no society-wide lockdown. In fact over several millennia spent dealing with plagues, we have never conducted a society-wide lockdown as a response to an outbreak before now.
This is the first time we've done it, and the full costs of this experiment are not yet known - and they wont be understood for decades to come.
> https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...
0 https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
US CDC seems to suggest vaccine to those who had COVID immediately after recovery[2]. Where as news sources claim WHO suggests 6 months after recovery[3].
[1]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2103916
[2]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html
[3]https://theprint.in/health/i-had-covid-when-should-i-get-vac...
"Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19. That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19."
This is downright false. Someone should seriously sue the CDC. I don't understand how they can get away with this anti science, anti math, illogerate bullsh*t. We know far more about the long term protective effects from recovering than we do from the vaccine (1 in 1,000 long term reinfection rate so far—https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...).
I would send a pull request but the CDC is not on Git. What a sorry excuse for an organization they are.
My parents got infected after ~ 30days of first dose Astrazenica, I got from them immediately. I had COVID brain fog, they didn't face much symptoms(vaccine doing it's job?). Luckily we all seem to be recovering well.
Now since we've got immunity and that evidence suggests that it should last at least 8 months we might delay the vaccine jabs as it's of extreme scarcity in the country and many vulnerable are waiting for it.
But I would wish for a immunity research with larger study group with the mutant strains supposedly capable of immune escape properties as we're facing here. Because I'm willing to take the risk based on current data, But I don't want to be wrong in suggesting that my elderly parents delay their second jab.
I would not worry about mutant strains either. It's a very genetically stable virus. Even though the numbers in India now are high, they are still significantly lower per capita than they were in the USA and UK last year. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
That's reassuring thank you.
>Even though the numbers in India now are high, they are still significantly lower per capita than they were in the USA and UK last year.
But there's consensus among the scientific community that it's being widely under-reported; At least 80-90% lesser than actual figures according to Dr. Ashish Jha dean of Brown University, School of Public Health[1].
P.S. Those who want to make a political comment for the above statement, I request you not to do so out of respect for the dead. I shared the information since we're discussing numbers and not for any political blame as Dr. Jha himself says.
Define consensus.
I used to work at Our World in Data, so I am biased, but I would consider them the most trustworthy curator of data sources (for one, they are open source and open to pull requests). So while there indeed may be problems with the India data (and we were constantly switching to better sources as they appeared), I would trust their data sources more than any one person on YouTube.
> I would trust their data sources more than any one person on YouTube
Certainly not just a single person. I'm sure if you have a trusted news source, You might find an article on the subject like these -
CNN: 'As Covid sweeps India, experts say cases and deaths are going unreported' - https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/27/india/india-covid-underre...
AP: 'Why number of COVID cases in India is exponentially higher than reported' - https://abc7chicago.com/india-covid-cases-coronavirus-case-c...
NYT: 'As Covid-19 Devastates India, Deaths Go Undercounted' - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavi...
Sky news: 'COVID-19: India crematoriums 'underreporting bodies' as suspicion grows over true number of coronavirus deaths ' - https://news.sky.com/story/india-crematoriums-underreporting...
Bloomberg: 'Even Record Death Toll May Hide Extent of India’s Covid Crisis' - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-22/even-reco...
ncbi: 'Underreporting COVID-19: the curious case of the Indian subcontinent' - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7508490/
There are local regional(state) media trying to count the uncounted deaths like these -
BBC report on that: 'India's Covid crisis: The newsroom counting the uncounted deaths' - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56969086 . I wonder whether Our World In Data would accept these data, If so it would be worth a PR then again its just the data of a state.
Awhile ago scientists were worried it was due to reinfection.
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00183-5/full...
[1] https://twitter.com/WesPegden/status/1336801382955933697
Part of it is that there's tens of millions of people infected with coronavirus right now, giving it lots of room to mutate. There's maybe a few hundred or a few thousand people infected with polio.
1) The rate of "vaccine escape" of the pathogen - that is, how well new variants of the pathogen can escape recognition by a vaccine. This varies from pathogen to pathogen.
2) The strength of the immune response to the vaccine. For example, live-attenuated vaccines are basically natural infections.
3) Whether or not your immune memory is occasionally boosted by coming into contact with someone who is shedding the pathogen.
All of these vary based on the pathogen and vaccine pairing. And critically, for COVID-19, we don't know several of these parameters.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/04/29/scie...
> After one dose, individuals with prior infection showed enhanced T cell immunity, antibody secreting memory B cell response to spike and neutralizing antibodies effective against B.1.1.7 and B.1.351. By comparison, HCW receiving one vaccine dose without prior infection showed reduced immunity against variants. B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 spike mutations resulted in increased, abrogated or unchanged T cell responses depending on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) polymorphisms. Single dose vaccination with BNT162b2 in the context of prior infection with a heterologous variant substantially enhances neutralizing antibody responses against variants.
For people that haven't been previously infected, the second dose is the similar booster.
Proof of immunity can have the server side component for verification, which was neglected for the vaccination effort
I was sort of thinking of the cost of doing the test when I said $5, rather than the retail cost (really, that's what I was thinking about!).
That said, there are few (if any) reasons not to do both, so at least for now I'm okay even if we did only push for vaccines-as-validation.
If recovery grants equivalent immunity, there's not only no reason to get a vaccine, there's reason to not get any vaccine: However rare complications are from the vaccines, there's no reason to risk them.
Edit: Ah, perhaps you mean for someone who has recovered. Given the reports that vaccination helps with those who are experiencing “long COVID”, plus the added protection, I’d eagerly get vaccinated even if I had recovered from infection.
A single positive result means so little, giving someone with your thinking that excuse not to get vaccinated just isn’t worth it.
You “risk it” for others, not yourself.
I live in a small town and people here aren't very concerned, so I'm asking seriously if activities are actually being gated on vaccination.
Israel reopened their society early after their final coronavirus lockdown by only allowing vaccinated to resume normal life.
The cruise lines that serve the USA and Caribbean islands are attempting to reopen while requiring all passengers to be vaccinated, but the governor of Florida is attempting to force them to allow unvaccinated passengers onboard.
It depends a lot on what country you are in and their attitudes towards vaccines and privacy.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-23/t-cell-sc...
Such reinfections are known to be possible in both overseas and local cases, he noted, but it is still unclear why they occur.
The minister said investigations are ongoing to determine if reinfections are due to a general waning of immunity levels over time, or a lack of cross-protection, despite a previous infection, against specific variants of the coronavirus that a person is exposed to for the first time.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/parliament-2...
> there have been 56 cases involving people who were infected despite being fully vaccinated, of which 30 were local cases and 26 were imported ones.
What that means is that fully vaccinated individuals can get infected and infect unvaccinated individuals. As such, your population won't be protected unless most people are vaccinated (80-90%+).
The US approved vaccines (so far) appear to be pretty good at preventing infection compared to lots of vaccines.
There's an obvious level of (incomplete) protection present in the population at 50% vaccination. Cases aren't falling because we are getting more careful (but then the nicer weather could be helping).
There's a scary situation happening here now for the last 2 weeks or so. There has been new clusters popping up after having been relatively tame for a few months and safety measures have been tightened (slightly, but obviously) again. Some of these cases involve those that has been vaccinated. One lesson that we can learn from this is, coming from a city that is marketed as having handled the situation well — the world is far from being done with dealing with COVID.
Marketing which is completely bullshit. Singapore has had around ~60k covid cases, 6x more than Hong Kong and 60x more than Taiwan, just somehow the government managed to downplay it as most of the cases were in poor migrant workers and apparently they don't count as people.
The US is close to 50%, with another good chunk of people with immunity from infection and our cases are dropping a good deal. The season changing is going to be some of it, but cases are dropping even as activities increase.
I'm not saying it is done, as much as anything because we need billions of doses of vaccine still, but there is lots of reason to be pretty hopeful.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
“Is One Vaccine Dose Enough After COVID-19 Infection?”
> A small, NIH-supported study, published as a pre-print on medRxiv, offers some early data on this important question [1]. The findings show that immune response to the first vaccine dose in a person who’s already had COVID-19 is equal to, or in some cases better, than the response to the second dose in a person who hasn’t had COVID-19. While much more research is needed—and I am definitely not suggesting a change in the current recommendations right now—the results raise the possibility that one dose might be enough for someone who’s been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and already generated antibodies against the virus.
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/02/23/is-one-dose-of-covi...
https://theconversation.com/why-you-should-get-a-covid-19-va...
This is false. She even goes on to say "Pfizer vaccine blocked 90% of infections after both doses" but we're seeing 99.9%+ protection from natural immunity.
She also doesn't put her logic on git (not surprising). If she had built a simple spreadsheet with the important data she'd realize her mistakes (assuming good faith).
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eabf4063.ful...
Still, it's clearly the case that people who have been infected are at reduced risk. I've been vaccinated and was never infected, so it's not a personal decision for me, but given the extremely low risk of the vaccine, even with this paper, I'd still likely get vaccinated and have family members who have done so. I don't think we have enough data yet to say they made a moronic decision.
"Among eligible PCR-positive individuals from the first surge of the epidemic, 72 (0·65% [95% CI 0·51-0·82]) tested positive again during the second surge compared with 16 819 (3·27% [3·22-3·32]) of 514 271 who tested negative during the first surge (adjusted RR 0·195 [95% CI 0·155-0·246]). Protection against repeat infection was 80·5% (95% CI 75·4-84·5). The alternative cohort analysis gave similar estimates (adjusted RR 0·212 [0·179-0·251], estimated protection 78·8% [74·9-82·1])."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33743221/
This paper indicates 95% efficacy due to natural infection for at least seven months in Qatar:
"Reinfection is rare in the young and international population of Qatar. Natural infection appears to elicit strong protection against reinfection with an efficacy ~95% for at least seven months."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33937733/
Relative risk is still in favor of being vaccinated: "In addition to not knowing the clinical course of reinfection, we do not know the variants' role in reinfection – primarily because they were not known to be “in play” during the study period. Overall, natural immunity is protective. Perhaps not as protective as vaccination. More importantly, vaccination comes with a far lower risk of morbidity (hospitalization) or death."
https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/03/24/how-protective-natural-...
Just getting out of it now I realize how much I missed 'normal' life.
I know of ~3 people that I know that have been infected. That's not counting a few people at work that I don't really know and things like that.
There might be other factors that would push the reinfection rate higher (eg, if people are less likely to get another COVID test after having had it once, because they assume that's the one thing it can't be), and it's also worth remembering that a 1-in-1000 reinfection rate combined with ~10% of the population catching it means that closer to 1-in-100 people don't develop a lasting immunity [and the other 9-in-1000 just didn't catch it a second time].
Like clockwork, every discussion of this matter on a discussion board brings out at least one person claiming to know people who have been re-infected, yet the number of confirmed examples is measured in the low hundreds, worldwide.
The immune system works, and the failure cases here are truly exceptional, whereas the likelihood of rumor is high. Most of these "{my friend} got Covid twice" stories are either hearsay, or people imagining that their allergy symptoms were Covid, while never getting tested properly.
I had an illness back in March 2020 that knocked me out for 2 weeks. Could have been COVID but my state had 0 available test kits so no one can confirm it. February 2021, I’m I’ll again for 2 week. This time it’s confirmed COVID.
If we expect immunity to only last about 12 months, then it could have been reinfection especially considering by 2021 there were 4 more strains to get.
2) We don't "expect immunity to only last about 12 months". It's been about 12 months since the first cases were confirmed, so that's as far as we can say.