It’s a COVID-19 patient’s nightmare: survive the disease only to face it again a few months later. With recent reports of some testing positive for the virus even after recovery, many are now wondering if it is possible to get infected twice.
But E. John Wherry, director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania, says these stories are purely anecdotal. “We just have not been in this long enough to really understand whether or not people can get reinfected,” he says. Instead, what might look like reinfection from a new exposure to the virus is more likely to be a smoldering first infection, he explains.
Adam K. Wheatley, an immunologist at The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne, Australia, says these anecdotes have led to a lot of speculation about reinfection. But he emphasizes that so far, the epidemiological data seems pretty clear that no one is picking up the virus from a new source within six months of their first infection. Based on this, his own estimate is that immunity to COVID-19 will be at least the length of what we’ve seen with milder coronaviruses that cause common colds — around 12-18 months.
