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Comment by qrybam | Hacker News Reader

That’s interesting. Maybe the duration of the trial was too short or sample size too small, because I know two people personally who were re-infected pre vaccination.

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Maybe too short, but also Covid-19 isn't really just one disease anymore, but rather a family of strains.

Just yesterday the news had an article about how a national level soccer player for Sweden who had been infected previously in the past managed to get infected again and infect parts of the team.

The player in question had been infected about a year ago initially (before the British strain was found) and with the British strain now being the main one in Sweden I don't think it's a far fetch to say that re-infections of a different strain is actually quite likely once a certain amount of time has passed.

>...with the British strain now being the main one in Sweden

Off topic, but at this stage I find this geographical naming of strains being much more confusing than useful.

Recently greek letters were introduced to remove the geographic stigma [1] , so that would read as "the Alpha strain now being the main one in Sweden"

Besides risking moral overtones ("the British strain? Typical - when they aren't being Hollywood baddies they're busy incubating viruses") it only tagged where a strain was first isolated, not necessarily its geographic origin (not that it actually matters whether the Kent variant actually came from that Home County)

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/covid-19-variants-del...

It's quite amusing that there was such a push at the start of the pandemic to not call it Chinese Flu or Wuhan Flu, but the British, South Africa, India and Brazil strains all caught on quickly in the media.

I wonder which political variable could have left office between then and now to explain that?

The "Kent variant" (later "English", now "Alpha") was first described in Sept 2020, widely publicised as having become the dominant strain in the UK in late Nov 2020.

So a geographic label was widely used before Biden without apparently causing ructions. It was adopted because the released name for the variant, lineage B.1.1.7, was less convenient or distinctively memorable for the public. If it had been repeatedly referred to as the "Kentish virus" by senior politicians then a similarly hostile reaction might have been seen as was for "Chinese virus".

"variant" is not offensive than "virus" so possibly it was accepted.

The thing that stikes me about the naming of variants, is that to your standard person on the street, referring to the variants by the place they were first identified is going to be considerably more meaningful than calling them a greek letter, especially with the less common letters. It's also easier to mentally track the variant's progress if you know where it "originated".

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01483-0

> Coronavirus variants get Greek names — but will scientists use them? From Alpha to Omega, the labelling system aims to avoid confusion and stigmatization.

> "I don't think it's a far fetch to say that re-infections of a different strain is actually quite likely once a certain amount of time has passed."

Based on my own personal experience (see my other post in this thread), I agree.

I'm living in Sweden and my girlfriend has been infected twice about a year apart. So yeah it seems like the passage of a year and the combination of new strains is enough for this to happen. Also unfortunately her second case was definitely worse than the first (which wasn't exactly fun either). It's a shitty disease.

You don’t actually know that for sure though. The following paper found PCR positives months after being infected, with a slowly decreasing odds ratio, which is in their words consistent with shedding: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

Unless someone gets a PCR positive, has the virus sequenced, and then gets a separate positive later, has the virus sequenced again and can confirm they were actually infected again with live virus (perhaps using live viral culture) they can’t really be sure.

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