Several people I know have already had coronavirus. Even though some of them got pretty sick, after they recovered, they have felt like they won the golden ticket. They got hit with a worst case scenario, survived, and now they can move through the world with virus-proof invincibility. Right? Maybe. Unfortunately, it appears that you can actually get coronavirus twice. Before you freak out, here’s what you need to know.
A case study published on Monday in The Lancet, a medical journal, confirmed that a 25-year-old Nevada man contracted — and was sick with — COVID-19 twice. The man, who remains anonymous to protect his medical privacy, was sick in April and tested positive for coronavirus then, NPR reported. He tested negative in May, but then he started showing symptoms later that month and tested positive again.
But how could this happen? Theoretically, once your immune system deals with a virus, it should make antibodies that help it combat the virus more effectively if you are exposed again, so most of us have just assumed that you can’t catch COVID-19 twice. But some scientists have been warning us that our lack of familiarity with the novel coronavirus, scientifically speaking, means that we can’t accurately predict how the human immune system will respond to it. Continue reading.