News

Setting it Straight - Issue #25

Written by Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty

Over the past two weeks we’ve discussed two well-documented instances of reinfection in people who had symptomatic COVID-19 infection and apparently recovered, but became infected again with a distinct ‘bar-coded’ (by mutation) virus variant. There are also a couple of fragmentary media mentions of individual cases in Belgium and the Netherlands. So far, only one person (Nevada) has been reported with substantial clinical symptoms the second time round though, as the interval between the two infections was relatively short, at least some of this could have been a carryover from the first exposure. And, in none of the instances so far, was it established that the second infection led to the production of infectious virus.