Bloomberg Opinion: Don’t Freak Out About Covid-19 Reinfection Stories

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The most attention-grabbing scare stories about the pandemic often revolve around individual cases — someone who got the disease twice; a young, fit person who died; an older person who was likely infectious for more than two months. The fear is that these phenomena could be widespread, but scientists who study infectious disease say it’s normal to see extreme variability in the human reaction to any virus.

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“There’s a vast diversity of immune responses as well as responses to infection,” says Dan Barouch, a vaccine researcher at Harvard Medical School. That’s the case with other pathogens from influenza to tuberculosis to HIV. “Sometimes it’s because of different genetics, and sometimes it’s from a different strain of the virus,” he says. “In some cases, it might be due to different viral doses or other immune parameters, or demographic variables — sometimes it comes down to chance.”

He said he’s not alarmed that there are a few documented cases of reinfection. Even if there are vastly more than the dozen or so reported reinfections, this would still represent a tiny sliver of the tens of millions of cases that have occurred worldwide.

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