The Atlantic
Coronavirus Reinfection Will Soon Become Our Reality
The virus can take many paths to reinvading a person’s body. Most of them shouldn’t scare us.
On its face,
reinfection appears to be a straightforward term. It is literally “infection, again” a recovered person’s second dalliance with the same microbe. Long written into the scientific literature of infectious disease, it is a familiar word, innocuous enough: a microbial echo, an immunological encore act.
But thanks to the pandemic, reinfection has become a semantic and scientific mess.
Newly saddled with the baggage of COVID-19, reinfection has taken on a more terrifying aspect, raising the specter of never-ending cycles of disease. It has sat at the center of debates over testing, immunity, and vaccines; its meaning muddled by ominous headlines, it has become wildly misunderstood. When I ask immunologists about reinfection in the context of the coronavirus, many sigh.