“I heard something different about immunity.
As in there aint none.”
If there were no immunity, nobody would recover in the first place. They’d just die or become a seething pile of virons. Immunity is a product of the body defending itself from the virus once it gets infected.
Cross-strain immunity is a different matter. It depends on how and in what ways one strain differs form another. Immunity then becomes a spectrum from “none” to “complete”.
The reinfection stories, while there are enough of them to not dismiss it out of hand, are likely the result of incomplete recovery (relapse) or exposure to a different strain. Likely. Highly likely, even. But not certain, because this virus as so many weapons in its arsenal that little would surprise me at this point.
Thank you, calenel. I appreciate you taking your time to educate me on this very much.
“The reinfection stories, while there are enough of them to not dismiss it out of hand, are likely the result of incomplete recovery (relapse) or exposure to a different strain. Likely. Highly likely, even. But not certain, because this virus as so many weapons in its arsenal that little would surprise me at this point.”
That about matches my thoughts on re-infection. What I think happens in these cases is that re-infected person gets a bad case of the virus, to at least the point of hospitalization, and has some permanent, maybe undetected, damage - and then when the virus comes around again, he simply doesn’t have the needed defenses for it.