kiki wrote:
knowing nothing (and commenting anyway) I wonder, with a virus as aggressive and opportunistic as this, if you can get reinfected shortly after recovering, but have a commensurately milder reaction (feel off but not sick) due to an adapted immune system. And get better at fighting it with each exposure.
paging François
Again, caveat I am not a doctor...
But my suspicion here is people who were declared "recovered" simply never were. It seems that the part of this thing that "makes you sick" isn't the virus really, but the body's reaction to it. It could very well be that people react to the virus by getting sick, maybe clear that reaction but are still infected. Maybe they are producing antibodies actively, but still haven't cleared the virus, then a few days later start feeling sick again as the virus doesn't get completely kicked out and the body reacts again trying to kill it.
Basically I think our immune systems are good enough to figure out how to kill this thing. However it might be taking much longer for the timeline to play out. Flu plays out over a week. But we are seeing simple incubation from infection to illness be more like 2 weeks here, and another 2 weeks to "feel better". So I can easily see this thing just being more like a 6-week illness and we aren't seeing the tail end of it yet from the first people who were infected.
I don't believe people are being reinfected. I am guessing that people simply aren't actually 100% recovered yet.
Again I am not a doctor and if someone with better knowledge can educate me if what I wrote above is wrong, please do so.