| Comment | That reinfection case tells us only about antibody resistance, not about long-term t-cell immunity, which is what matters. We simply don't know anything about that yet. If CV19 behaves like any other coronavirus then once you get beyond the antibody period there is likely no enhanced immune response to reinfection.
So your thesis that a u40 who has had it is much less likely to die if they catch it in their 80s is also completely unsupported by evidence.
Yes, I'm conjecturing. But based on what we know about coronavirii, and the fact that age is already established as a co-morbidity, the scenario I'm proposing - where we basically have a version of the common cold endemically killing 1 in 200 people over 60 every year - is not unreasonable. And that reinfection - again, just like the common cold and every other coronavirus we know - would give a huge reduction in life expectancy (although obviously in practice it would lead to mass shielding).
We don't yet know enough about co-morbidities to say if this would happen, or if only specific people are genetically at risk, but it's credible enough to give us cause not to permit CV19 to be endemic and 'run its course' because, fundamentally, its course will never be run.
And that's not even considering the non-fatal effects of long-tail covid. |
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