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Okay but there is no natural immunity? People can get reinfected?

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22 points
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There is natural immunity and people can get reinfected.

After getting Covid your body still has and knows how to make Covid-19 antibodies, but this deteriorates over time.

This October 2021 paper on the durability of natural immunity against Covid-19 reinfection found that you can get Covid again as soon as 3 months after recovering from a case of Covid-19, and if the disease became endemic, the median person would get re-infected every 16 months. It’s worth noting that as this paper was published in October 2021 they were looking at Delta, not Omicron, which could change the numbers significantly.

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So there is natural immunity but covid will still kill millions in the coming years basically?

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15 points

it’ll mostly kill the unvaxxed, but i expect everybody to be fully debilitated from long covid in a decade or two if the median person gets reinfected every 16 months. health care in the west will of course be completely wrecked long before that happens.

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14 points

I wonder how much damage person could take with every reinfection for new variant. Your lung and airway can’t take that much damage before it fail, can’t they

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9 points

There’s also T cell exhaustion that can occur with continuous infections over and over (you get one strain of covid, then the flu or a bacterial infection then recover and another strain pops up to continue that slow wear and tear).

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