D&D and the rising pandemic

[Mikeythorn]

I don't know if I'd call this official. No input from an actual doctor... just a reporter speaking to a woman who says she has caught it a second time. Maybe it's true, and the reporting is just sloppy, but at face value, this isn't official.

A single case of reinfection is pretty meaningless. For a start, one of those tests could easily have been a false-positive. Secondly, there are always exceptions to the rule when it comes to illness. Having measles is meant to provide lifelong immunity to that disease, but there are a tiny number of people who get it twice. I know, because I was one of those.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

A single case of reinfection is pretty meaningless. For a start, one of those tests could easily have been a false-positive. Secondly, there are always exceptions to the rule when it comes to illness. Having measles is meant to provide lifelong immunity to that disease, but there are a tiny number of people who get it twice. I know, because I was one of those.

Not likely to be false positives- she was tested the first time because she had the classic symptoms- you almost couldn‘t get tested in Texas in February if you didn’t. In the second case, she had the same symptoms, triggering the second test.

Could she be more susceptible to COVID-19? Absolutely. There’s discussio about links between blood types and severity and other factors, and variations in susceptibility based on genetic, environmental, and other factors is pretty common.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

She could have a weakened immune system, have prior health conditions, never truly recovered and just had it get worse suddenly, or any number of these scenarios. The most frightening option, IMO, is that it mutated enough to become a different strain, but this is unlikely.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

She could have a weakened immune system, have prior health conditions, never truly recovered and just had it get worse suddenly, or any number of these scenarios. The most frightening option, IMO, is that it mutated enough to become a different strain, but this is unlikely.

Given that she’s donated plasma twice since recovering from her February diagnosis, it’s unlikely that she simply had COVID-19 all this time.

So far, COVID-19 has proven to be a slow mutator- something driving researchers to believe that if effective treatments can be found, they will likely be effective for all strains.

 

[ccs]

They currently have 930k confirmed cases and only 1.6 million tests.

That's a huge % of positives.

Untested positive cases are likely going to be very high as they aren't doing enough testing.

Maybe the deforestation rate in the Amazon rainforest will slow.

 

[Zardnaar]

It happened. 3 month break Covid and vaguely related to the OP.

6 players, another group behind them.

 

[Umbran]

It happened. 3 month break Covid and vaguely related to the OP.

6 players, another group behind them.

I know your country is doing great. But that image makes me cringe at this point.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Whenever in a movie or tv show now I see 2 people not wearing facemasks shake hands and stand close together, I wince and mentally scream at them to move away from each other.
This pandemic has traumatized me, I think.

 

[briggart]

Don’t know if this is technically a relapse, infection by a new strain, or an indicator that exposure to Covid-19 does not convey strong and lasting immunity, but we have one official case of a woman being hospitalized after catching covid-19 for the second time this year.

Dallas Woman Battling Coronavirus, Again

A Dallas woman tested positive for COVID-19 in February, recovered then tested positive again in June.

www.nbcdfw.com

A possibly comforting news from South Korea: apparently re-lapse cases have very low probability of passing it on to other people, to the point that SK suspended isolation measures for re-positives.

KDCA

KDCA

www.cdc.go.kr

This is ~1 month old but, as far as I understand, it's the current SK policy.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

A possibly comforting news from South Korea: apparently re-lapse cases have very low probability of passing it on to other people, to the point that SK suspended isolation measures for re-positives.

In this particular scenario, I was less concerned about the issue of contagion than the hell of going through a second illness with Covid-19, as well as the implications of what the various possible reasons for reinfection could mean for how humanity may have to coexist with this virus going forward, absent the discovery of effective treatments.

If, for instance, genetic factors or (non-Covid) pre-existing conditions made her more vulnerable, we’ll handle things differently than if post-exposure immunity to Covid is weak and short in duration. In the latter case, you’re talking orders of magnitude more people being at risk for reinfection than the former.