Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeku | Hacker News Reader

Last medical paper I read was using a cohort of 20,000 people. This paper concluded that natural covid immunity doesn't last forever. Median time to reinfection was 160+ days.

Is there new research or something? I keep seeing people talk about this and no one ever provides a source.

source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.13.21249642v...

Additionally here's a bunch of data that makes me doubt your point about naturally immunity being superior to vaccines:

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrou...

View on HN

Please tell me if my understanding is incorrect, I assert ....

That 160+ days seems to come entirely from the study window itself and I don't see how it would give an indication of general immunity of the study cohorts. If you wait longer as more people wind up infected that number only goes up.

To provide some additional context from the linked study, only 5.7 per 100,000 people were reinfected during the study window while 57.3 per 100,000 were infected for the first time. To put it into vaccine effectiveness terms that is a 90% effective. I didn't read to see if the cohorts were demographic matched.

If I'm understanding it correctly, then I think you misrepresent that 160 number.

Appreciate your effort to link to sources. We fundamentally suffer from lack of data: what are the morbidity and mortality by age group, by comorbidity (obesity and diabetes), by unvax / unvax + covid / vax? Furthermore, being 'published' on medrxiv is not a guarantee for accuracy or reproducibility. Cue in the Ivermectin saga...

I wish CDC would actually collect basic epidemiological data, but it seems completely disorganized and able to perform simple functions. Is there some alternative source, perhaps in some other country?

Sure apologies for linking a preprint.

The study I linked earlier went on to be published in Lancet which is a super top tier medical journal. Here is the link: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Also I find that the NHS over in England collects great data and personally I use them as a primary learning body for covid.

Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com