this is so close to meaningless as to be indistinguishable and this press release is so riddled with errors i question the authors seriously

first, if you search for pretty much any virus this intensely, you can find something like this.

disease resistance is never 100%. ever. https://twitter.com/cwylilian/status/1297830744509698050

if i sufficiently immuno-suppress you, you can get chicken pox a second time. or mono. this hardly makes them high risk for re-infection

if it's real, this is likely a fluke

the world is full of weird corner cases. basing policy on them is foolish.

but whether it's real is an open question

his second case had no symptoms and viral load of 26, likely too low to be contagious.

so was he even sick?

was this live virus or fragments killed by immune system?

PCR cannot tell.

it's suspicious they did not try to culture it

the idea that antibodies waning means resistance is gone is ridiculous. this make me outright suspicious.

of course they do. you don't carry around a full complement of every antibody you know how to make all the time.

and this is not even the main path used to fight cov-19.

most resistance is t-cell mediated.

these guys keep making weird claims and testing the wrong things. this whole study and claim set seem deeply iffy. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(20)30102-6

and w/ 40-80% already having cross resistance from other cov exposure, this is CLEARLY long lived. t-cell response to sars1 is robust 13 years later.

the evidence is overwhelming that this is similar and that the best resistance is broad based (from many pathways)

this further suggests durable response and ability to adapt to mutation.

the version of covid he had the second time was different from the first one.

yet it appears his body recognized it sufficiently to mount a response and recover without fever or high viral load

in any other year on earth, neither he nor anyone else would have even noticed this.

this kind of obsessive testing with tools that cannot tell dead virus from live and creates all manner of weird possible outcomes that are not normally around

the conclusions they draw from this one off possible non-event are absurd.

"it is unlikely that herd immunity can eliminate sars-cov-2"?

seriously?

from one weird corner case (and likely non case) where 2nd infection was asympt and low load and not even shown to be viable?

they speak of "re-infection being common in coronaviruses" but this is outlandishly misleading.

it's true with the big 4, but not with SARS or MERS, the close relatives here.

so this is literally taking one datapoint and drawing from it to infinity and ignoring all others

this is particularly true because of the nature of the resistance to covid-19.

it is diversity of response that is most effective, not intense single pathway response.

and that is MUCH harder for a virus to mutate away from.

you can see the whole article here.

this guts the idea that herd immunity is not real or that small mutations are likely to kick off new epidemics.

it also makes vaccines trickier and the HK claims about needed them suspicious.

that article is junk.

https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-35331/v1/f5e6a012-ba42-4d28-9d8b-990919e350ea.pdf

it's also worth noting that making carriers seriously ill or die is maladpative for a virus. their evolutionary pressure is toward mildness, not deadliness.

so this mordant fear so many seem to have that the virus is one mutation away from killing us all is pretty baseless.

so, i'm flat out calling BS on this HK article.

it's one case in 100's of millions. it's not clear the second infection was even real, live virus, or contagious. (it was not symptomatic)

if you ran around PCR testing 100 million people for flu, you'd find this too.

and they are using this possibly not even a corner case to make sensational headlines and push broad based policy.

that's not science. that's politics and propaganda

at worst, we'd get a 5th strain of common cold to add to the other 4, but there is no real evidence of that yet

so let's just take a breath here and remember just how badly these panic papers have fared over the last several months.

there is a 99.9999% chance this is nothing at all relevant.