3 ms·

This isn't a particularly great argument (and is scientifically dubious). There are different strains of flus, colds, and recently, a few different strains of

This isn't a particularly great argument (and is scientifically dubious). There are different strains of flus, colds, and recently, a few different strains of coronavirus. You can't generally be reinfected by the same strain. What can happen is that new strains can infect you. There are tons of cold strains around, and the flu mutates quickly enough that each year we get a new one, so vaccines have to be redeveloped for each new round of mutations. Coronavirus is the same way, except that as far as I know, it mutates much more slowly than cold and flu viruses, meaning that vaccines (and having gotten it once) will be equally and more effective than flu or cold vaccines.

ojnabieoot 6y ago
> You can't generally be reinfected by the same strain. Unless the word "generally" is doing a lot of work in this sentence - YES YOU CAN be reinfected by the same strain. It's called "homologous reinfection": the person's natural immune response is not always up to the task of actually providing immunity to a specific viral strain, and that exact same viral strain can reinfect the patient even immediately after recovery. This idea that the human immune response is always 100% effective (assuming the patient survives) is frankly a bizarre misconception: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3863957/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3863957/
- anonymousiam 6y ago
  So you are agreeing with the statement, and describing a rare outlier exception. I believe the number of documented Covid-19 re-infections is very small, and that one (1) person has died after re-infection. Statistically speaking, we're still up in the six sigma range of people who have not been re-infected. This (statistics) is the basis of public health policy.