Where, exactly, might responses to the new coronavirus fall on this continuum of induced immunishness? That’s still unknown. Read all of our coronavirus coverage here. The robustness of this immunish state-whether it prevents all reinfection or merely makes a second round of sickness less intense-and the period of time for which it lasts will depend on multiple factors, such as a patient’s genetics and sex (women tend to have stronger immune reactions than men), the strength of their initial immune response, and the characteristics of the virus itself as it continues to evolve. Instead, they enter into a state you might think of as “immunishness,” an intermediate level of protection that dwindles over time. Yet a crude assumption can still be hiding in this miasma of uncertainty: that at any given point in time, people are perfectly immune to Covid-19-or else they’re not.Įxperts say that SARS-CoV-2 likely falls somewhere in the middle, such that people who get exposed are neither sterilized against further illness nor left utterly defenseless. The wisest commentators point to all the factors that remain unknown they warn us that it’s possible that protection from Covid-19 will be short-lived or that it will go only to some of those who get infected. It tends to conjure something binary: Either you have it or you don’t either you’re a member of the superpowered legion of recovered, or you’re a vulnerable normie like the rest of us. The problem starts with just the word, immunity. “So far, however, only the first glimmers of data are available about immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.”īut public debates about immunity to Covid-19 could still be subject to a treacherous misapprehension, even once the caveats above have been acknowledged. “Immunity after any infection can range from lifelong and complete to nearly nonexistent,” the epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch said in The New York Times on Sunday.
Even if our bodies learn to fight off the illness, we don’t know how long this protection might endure. As many have pointed out, we can’t assume that any prior exposure to the virus will make it so a person can’t get sick again.
The answers to these questions come with considerable caveats. Subscribe to WIRED and stay smart with more of your favorite Ideas writers.
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