Tests reveal silent [coronavirus] reinfections in hospital workers. It's the September 28 post, you may have to scroll down and around a bit. It's worth it, it's short.
Corona reinfection? On the face of it, that doesn't sound very good, and it is true that no reinfection is what we'd really want. However, there is a silver lining. It's a slightly different strain, so OK, viruses are gonna mutate and reinfect, anybody who's gotten more than one cold in their lifetime knows that. Here's the good news though: the fact that these are asymptomatic cases means that these hospital workers weren't slammed by antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) on reinfection.
ADE was a remote but real possibility, something that could make a good-but-not-perfect vaccine completely backfire. With this news though, it seems that if the possibility of ADE was remote before, it's now remote-squared. Additionally, the fact that only a couple of cases have shown up means that there is likely some cross-protection between slightly different versions of the virus.
It's all very preliminary, but I'll take any good news on this topic that I can get these days. BTW, these brief daily updates from Nature are one of the best sources of real news on the matter that I've found. No sensationalism, just a bite-sized bit of the latest science.
