On the other hand, I read an article by a doctor who had a patient become reinfected with Covid-19 (with a couple of negative tests in between. The second infection was much worse than the first. Obviously an N=1 case, but it made him wonder whether Covid-19 will turn out like dengue fever where people with a repeat infection have an increased chance of having a severe case. Sorry to bash your hopeful speculation -- just saying that nobody really knows or has a real positive educated guess about all this stuff.

IMO there is a egregious lack of effort to resolve these "guesses"... at least that I'm aware of. Over 5 months in and it's still mostly hand waving when it comes to C19.

It would be nice if they could, but I believe it is really hard to do science on reinfections that fast. There are obvious ethical issues with intentionally trying to reinfect individuals to see what happens. If you get 3 to 6 months of immunity, we don't have very many people coming off yet. And then the infection rates are relatively low even in hot spots. So the number of people getting reinfected would still be expected to be very low at this time even if immunity is relatively short. And you can only count people that got a positive test the first time and thus are confirmed reinfected. And that gives you a pretty small sample space so hard to get statistically meaningful versus anecdotal info.

They can do (and hopefully are doing) experiments on animals (I think they have established that certain monkey and/or monkey-like animals are susceptible to COVID) -- but I would expect it will take some time before you get meaningful info and even then you would have a big question as to whether the results apply equally to humans.

CAVEAT: I am not an epidemioligist, biologist, scientist, doctor, etc., nor do I play one on TV.

Yes, it’s called antibody dependent enhancement.

There is actually a reasonably credible hypothesis that this is one of the potential causes of severe COVID cases.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...articles/PMC7311339/

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At least you included the bit I put in bold!

I'd say a more concentrated effort is being applied to this than has ever before been applied to a medical problem. And it's more than 5 months. I think work got started in earnest in January. Still that's a very very short timespan especially when you're trying to study time and distribution dependent mechanisms as Hugoagogo explained.

I think it's fair to criticise much of the political action around this but in general, from what I can see, I think the response from the scientific community has been pretty good.