The People Who Get Covid Twice

the labor market than economists anticipated. According to the International Labor Organization, the i l O also predicts a much slower recovery. At the end of this year. The i l O said that global working hours were seventeen percent lower than the end of equivalent to almost five hundred million jobs. That's up from four hundred million projected in June. Johnson and Johnson has begun dosing up to sixty thousand

volunteers in a study of its COVID nineteen vaccine. It's the first big US trial of an inoculation that may only require one shot. J and J is the fourth vaccine maker to move its candidate into late stage human studies in the US. If enrollment goes as expected, the trial could yield results as soon as the end of the year, allowing the company to seek emergency authorization early

next year if it proves effective. Finally, the Trump administration has shifted billions of dollars away from public health programs for testing and mask funds into its Operation Warp Speed vaccine effort. It's a sign the US government is increasing

its focus on a medical solution to the pandemic. The transfers, disclosed in the government audit reported by Bloomberg News and described by Congressional Aids, have increased the budget of the Warp Speed program to as much as eighteen billion dollars, much larger than the ten billion dollar figure the administration has routinely cited in public and now for today's main story, scientists in Hong Kong were ar died last month. What

many Headlong suspected could happen. Someone who had recovered from COVID nineteen caught the coronavirus again. Since then, about a dozen cases of reinfection have been reported worldwide. These cases demonstrate that a natural infection doesn't lead to lasting protection, and that the pandemic could persist in the human population. Bloomberg New Senior editor Jason Gale talked to health experts about what this means for our ability to stop the

virus and to produce an effective immunization. Anecdotes of people being infected by the coronavirus twice have appeared in the media since at least February, but these cases went proven. To demonstrate reinfection, scientists have to isolate the microbial culprit at each time, check it's genetic, think a print, show that each infection was caused by a different virus. Scientists in Hong Kong reported the first confirmed reinfection almost a

month ago. I asked an infectious diseases physician, he's worked on a lot of outbreaks, how we should interpret that finding. I'm Dr Tom friedan president and chief executive officer of Resolved Saved Lives and former director of both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Commissioner of the New

York City Health Department. Well, first, we're continuing to learn more every day, but it's clear now that reinfection can happen, how often it happens, and what the implications are for both natural infection and vaccine induced immunity really are still unclear. Reinfections have now been confirmed in Asia, Europe, and North and South America. That all up, these cases probably number less than a dozen, which is reassuring. Right, globally we

certainly had more than a hundred million infections. Now if we haven't seen a lot of reinfection, it must be rare, or you can say, you know, we're really not looking and until we look, we're not going to find. I think most of us believe that there is some level of immunity for some period of time in some people, but those are very vague qualifiers is some ten percent or eighty percent, and really until we get better dead

and we won't know. This first case reported by doctors at the University of Hong Kong occurred in at thirty three year old nine t worker who had a mild case of COVID nineteen in March last month. He was screened for the coronavirus at the airport after we return from a works trip to Europe. The man didn't have any symptoms, so it was no doubt a surprise when the test came down't positive. The fact that he was infected without symptoms suggested to some scientists that his memory

immune response prevented any symptomatic disease. In other words, that natural infection protected him from getting the cough soil throughout favor and headache he experienced four and a half months earlier, but it didn't prevent him being infected again. I asked Tom, is this what we might expect from a subsequent infection with the Sasko et virus. Well, one theory is that

you're not likely to get severe disease twice. There is a reported case of someone who had mild disease the first time and then moderately severe disease the second time, and someone else who had moderately severe disease the first time and mild disease the second time. And the theory here is that it's the more severe disease that's more

likely to result in protective antibodies. We know that there are some people who have very mild disease who don't seem to mount an antibody response, and that may correlate with being able to get infected again. It also seems

antibodies don't always stick around that long. Last Thursday, researches at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center published a study in which they found more than half of the health care workers who have been infected with sansko vie too and had detectable antibodies in early April didn't have detectable antibodies two months later. The researchers said they didn't know whether the decline and antibodies increases risk of reinfection and disease.

It's at least helping us understand what the limitations of immunity against COVID nineteen might be. I think it's unlikely that immunity to COVID is going to be as dramatically effective as to say, immunity to measles is. If you get measles naturally once in your life, you will in all likelihood never get it again. In contrast, if you get influenza or malaria or lots of other conditions, you may get them again, but perhaps less Seriously, we really

don't know at this point enough about COVID. But what has emerged is that um certain antibodies known as neutralizing antibodies, do appear that they may be protective and that's why we're hopeful that vaccination may be possible, But until that's proven, that's just the theory. There's a possibility that immune protection against the coronavirus might be cumulative. The more times are immune system says the virus, the better and faster it could be in awarding it. Tom says, we don't know

that for sure, though. Well, there's something called an anamnastic response, where when someone is exposed again and again to a pathogen it strengthens their immune system. That's one theory, but we really don't know what the reality is with COVID. What we do know is that there's a wide variety of illness. Some people get infected and it's quite mild. Other people will get infected and they can get severely ill or died, and we're not sure what the difference is.

One of the key questions around reinfection is whether someone who has called the virus again is capable of transmitting it. Some pointed to one example that indicated someone could be infectious and another example that suggested they might not be. At this point, um there are theories but no proof. For example, someone who has had a mild infection before has very little immunity may behave just the same as

someone who is infected for the first time. In contrast, someone who was very ill and has a high level of neutralizing antibody may indeed reduce their viral load and be less infectious. It's something that we need to figure out.

So what do these reinfections mean for our ability to reach herd immunity where the virus is potential to spread is mitigated by a high level of immune protection in the community, all bets are off still um the likelihood is that herd immunity is going to involve well over half of the population getting infected, but there's still many unknowns, And one thing that's important to keep in mind is that herd immunity is not a dichotomy. It's not her immunity on off. The more people who are immune in

a community to slower the virus spreads. What is certainly the case is that in all likelihood, getting to herd immunity for COVID in the US would require an infection rate of something like currently we're at about we have two d thousand deaths, So in all likelihood, getting to herd immunity in the US would involve another six hundred thousand deaths. We're talking about more than almost any war in US history. When does all this slave vaccine for COVID?

Dr Chip School, the professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases that you see San Diego School of Medicine, says, we have to be careful about going down the AIDS vaccine hole. As you remember, we're gonna have an age vaccine and we never got one. But we've done pretty well with ADS, and we did it with drugs, and we did it with behavioral changes, and we may be

in the same boat with Yeah. I mean, these reinfections have to give you pause about thinking that you can do better with a vaccine and you can do with natural infection. Chip says previous research with vaccines suggests that the immunity isn't long and it may not be the silver bullet many of us being included, hoping it will be. That's why I think it's important to try to UM optimize non vaccine interventions UM and get back to business.

I think we really have to get on with it about how to operate in the in the colvid era where the virus is kind of gonna be looking over our shoulder for a wild to come. There's so much we don't know about the coronavirus, including our ability to produce a safe, effective and durable immune response with the vaccine, But there are things we do know we can do

to stop the pandemic. While we push ahead with developing vaccines, we also have to develop better treatments and keep practicing physical distancing, hand washing, mask wearing, and everything else we can to prevent infections. That was Jason Gale, and that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one beers around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Toph for foreheads Jordan Gaspoure, Magnus Henrickson, and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Jason Gale. Original music by Leo Sedrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening.