Hong Kong University scientists released a paper Monday describing what they said was the first documented case of a person developing consecutive laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 infections, raising fears that herd immunity won’t stop the pandemic.
But a top U.S. infectious disease expert tells Barron’s that it’s too early to be worried.
“This is one of the big, big questions in the field, whether one infection protects from a second infection,” acknowledges Dr. Bruce Walker, director of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, a biomedical research institute. “The implications if natural infection are not protective are large.”
While the data from the Hong Kong University scientists is interesting, he said, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that a sampling mix-up may have led to the finding that the man described in the paper was infected twice. And he says that, even if a natural infection doesn’t offer protection from Covid-19 infections, that doesn’t mean that vaccines won’t work.